The computational nature of phonological generalizations

Abstract

This chapter studies the nature of the typology of phonological markedness constraints and the nature of the typology of the transformation from underlying to surface forms from a computational perspective. It argues that there are strong computational laws that constrain the form of these constraints and transformations. These laws are currently stated most clearly in terms of the so-called subregular hierarchies, which have been established for stringsets (for modeling constraints) and are currently being established for string-to-string maps (for modeling the transformations). It is anticipated that future research will reveal equally powerful laws applicable to non-string-based representations. Finally, this chapter argues that these laws arise as a natural consequence of how humans generalize from data.Wilhelm von Humboldt's phrase "language makes infinite use of finite means" (1836/1999) is oft-cited by Chomsky because not only does it encapsulate an important characteristic of natural language, but it also highlights why generative grammars play an important role in understanding this aspect of language. In brief, the generative grammars are the finite means, but the linguistic knowledge they represent can be applied to unboundedly many linguistic forms. The psychological reality of generative grammars is the powerful scientific hypothesis which underlies all work in generative linguistics.

Proceedings of the 15th Meeting on the Mathematics of Language

“…We can then talk about strings and their corresponding ARs. Jardine and Heinz (2015) define such a relationship in terms of concatenation, but they do not address how this relationship connects to complexity. As discussed in §3.1, natural language phonotactics are largely describable with FO-definable stringsets.…”

Proceedings of the 14th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

“…The subregular hierarchy includes many other classes (see Fig. 1), but the previous three are noteworthy because they are conceptually simple and efficiently learnable in the limit from positive data (Heinz et al, 2012;Jardine and Heinz, 2016) while also furnishing sufficient power for a wide range of phonological phenomena (Heinz, 2015;Jardine, 2015).…”

“…Most phonological dependencies can be described in strictly local terms -see Heinz (2015) for numerous examples. Consider for instance the well-known process of word-final obstruent devoicing that forces voiced obstruents at the end of the word to be realized as voiceless: moroz [maros] 'frost' in Russian, Bad [bat] 'bath' in German).…”

“…The subregular hierarchy includes many other classes (see Fig. 1), but the previous three are noteworthy because they are conceptually simple and efficiently learnable in the limit from positive data (Heinz et al, 2012;Jardine and Heinz, 2016) while also furnishing sufficient power for a wide range of phonological phenomena (Heinz, 2015;Jardine, 2015).In this section, we investigate the role of strictly local, strictly piecewise and tier-based strictly local patterns in morphotactics. We show that some but not all patterns are strictly local or strictly piecewise, whereas all typologically instantiated patterns seem to fit in the class of tier-based strictly local languages.…”

Graph Transductions and Typological Gaps in Morphological Paradigms

“…The PCC, for instance, is utterly unremarkable from a formal perspective: the constrained elements are string adjacent clitics, and the sets of permitted and blocked configurations are both finite. As a result, every PCC variant is strictly 2-local over strings (McNaughton and Papert, 1971), making it even less complex than simple phonological processes such as intervocalic voicing and locally bounded vowel harmony (Heinz, 2015). Since different PCCs only vary in which one of six IO-DO combinations they allow, there are no quantifiable consequences for learnability, either.…”