The typological effects of ABC constraint definitions

Abstract

Recent work under the theoretical banner of Agreement by Correspondence (ABC) has produced a variety of different – and sometimes contradictory – formulations of the constraints central to this framework. In OT, the effects of such definitional choices come out in the factorial typologies they predict. Yet knowing what languages a theoretical system derives is insufficient unless we know why it does so. This requires analysis of the internal ranking structures of the typology itself. This paper compares the typologies produced under different proposed modifications to the main ABC constraints. We analyse the typologies in Property Theory, a theory of typological organisation in OT. Our analyses show that all variations have a common core structure, and that differences in their factorial typologies reduce to differences in how this common structure expands and iterates for different features. This allows for precise delineation of how and why different ABC constraint definitions affect typologies.

ABP and ABC: Agreement with/out correspondence

“…CC.ID constraints are violated when pairs of corresponding segments do not agree in some feature(s) 2 . Various formulations of these core constraints have been proposed (see Bennett & DelBusso 2018a for an analysis of a set of these); most pertinent here is Walker's (2016) modification of CC.ID to also include a second specification of a shared feature, αG. This constraint is very similar to the ABP AGR constraints, though its violation is crucially still contingent on correspondence.…”

“…While case studies can show interesting points of distinction, these are themselves embedded within full systems, and the constraint interactions deriving them can only be grasped through examining how the constraints interact in general. In this paper, we follow Bennett & DelBusso (2018a) and analyze the full typology of a basic ABP system. We use Property Theory (Alber & Prince in prep.…”

Summing constraints in and across properties

“…Agreement by Correspondence (ABC) – and related theories examined in Bennett & DelBusso (2018) and DelBusso & Bennett (2019) – provides examples of both types of summing analysed here.…”

“…In ABC typologies, a clear example is differences between features. In a system studied by Bennett & DelBusso (2018), there are two doubly parallel properties, each of which has a class of one feature-specific Corr constraint and one feature-specific CC.Id constraint as one antagonist, and a class of IO. Id constraints as the other, as in (15).…”

“…While the two cases are developed using abstract OT systems, both are manifested in concrete OT systems as well, including the typologies analysed in Bennett & DelBusso (2018) and DelBusso & Bennett (2019), which are based on the literature on Agreement by Correspondence (Rose & Walker 2004, Hansson 2010, Bennett 2015). The SA case connects to theories that posit families of parallel constraints, such as constraint schemata that make the same kind of choice independently available for different features, arrangements, directions, categories, etc.…”