Action-Sensitive Phonological Dependencies
This work addresses a specific linguistic modeling problem for phonologists, offering an incremental improvement in formalizing phonological dependencies.
The paper tackles the problem of modeling rhythmic syncope in phonology by introducing tier-based synchronized strictly local (TSSL) functions, showing they naturally describe this phenomenon while existing tier-based input-output strictly local (TIOSL) functions cannot, and arguing that TSSL provides a more restricted characterization than Optimality Theory.
This paper defines a subregular class of functions called the tier-based synchronized strictly local (TSSL) functions. These functions are similar to the the tier-based input-output strictly local (TIOSL) functions, except that the locality condition is enforced not on the input and output streams, but on the computation history of the minimal subsequential finite-state transducer. We show that TSSL functions naturally describe rhythmic syncope while TIOSL functions cannot, and we argue that TSSL functions provide a more restricted characterization of rhythmic syncope than existing treatments within Optimality Theory.