Decomposing phonological transformations in serial derivations

While most phonological transformations have been shown to be subsequential, there are tonal processes that do not belong to any subregular class, thereby making it difficult to identify a tighter bound on the complexity of phonological processes than the regular languages. This paper argues that a tighter bound obtains from examining the way transformations are computed: when derived in serial, phonological processes can be decomposed into iterated subsequential maps

DIRECTIONAL HARMONIC SERIALISM

This dissertation proposes a novel phonological framework, directional Harmonic Serialism, that synthesizes constraint-based, rule-based, and formal language theoretic approaches to phonology. I illustrate its advantages in the domains of feature spreading, quantity-insensitive footing, and autosegmental phonology. Specifically, I demonstrate that across these disparate domains, directional Harmonic Serialism makes empirical predictions that more tightly model natural language phonology than alternative theories and that it does so using fewer theoretical mechanisms. At a high level, the theory outperforms alternatives using a simpler, more restricted toolkit

Progressive place assimilation in optimality theory

This thesis presents an investigation into progressive place agreement in clusters through the lens of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004; McCarthy & Prince, 1995, 1999). A large typology of such languages is presented and examined to detail a broad swath of phenomena. The main line of inquiry over this typology is how direction of assimilation is formally represented. This work argues that simple phonological mechanisms explain the cross-linguistic effects including an agreement constraint and conflicting faithfulness constraints

A restrictive, parsimonious theory of footing in directional Harmonic Serialism

This paper develops a theory of footing in Harmonic Serialism (HS; Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004; McCarthy 2000, 2016) where Con contains only directionally evaluated constraints (Eisner 2000, 2002; Lamont 2019, 2022a, 2022b). Directional constraints harmonically order candidates by the location of violations rather than the total number of violations. A central result of adopting directional evaluation is that the constraint Parse( $\sigma$ ) not only motivates iterative footing but also determines where feet surface. This obviates the need for alignment constraints (McCarthy & Prince 1993; McCarthy 2003; Hyde 2012a, 2016), which determine where feet are parsed in HS with constraints that count loci (Pruitt 2010, 2012). The theory uses fewer constraints, is empirically adequate, and makes more restrictive predictions than HS with counting constraints and parallel Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004) with directional constraints

Turkic Nasal Harmony as Surface Correspondence

Turkic languages are well known for syllable contact phenomena – sonority-driven processes where suffix-initial sonorants surface as obstruents in certain environments. These alternations interact with nasal harmony, a less studied phenomenon where underlying stops and nasals surface as nasals between two nasals. Nasal harmony is attested in about ten Turkic languages (Shor, various Khakas varieties, northern and southern Altay varieties, Kazakh, Qaraqalpaq, Noghay, possibly Karachay-Balkar, and Kazan and Siberian Tatar varieties), and it varies in its scope and how it interacts with syllable contact phenomena. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of nasal harmony in Kazakh, which has one of the richest nasal harmony systems, and explore an analysis within Surface Correspondence Theory

Inferring the rules of social interaction in migrating caribou

Social interactions are a significant factor that influence the decision-making of species ranging from humans to bacteria. In the context of animal migration, social interactions may lead to improved decision-making, greater ability to respond to environmental cues, and the cultural transmission of optimal routes. Despite their significance, the precise nature of social interactions in migrating species remains largely unknown. Here we deploy unmanned aerial systems to collect aerial footage of caribou as they undertake their migration from Victoria Island to mainland Canada. Through a Bayesian analysis of trajectories we reveal the fine-scale interaction rules of migrating caribou and show they are attracted to one another and copy directional choices of neighbours, but do not interact through clearly defined metric or topological interaction ranges. By explicitly considering the role of social information on movement decisions we construct a map of near neighbour influence that quantifies the nature of information flow in these herds. These results will inform more realistic, mechanism-based models of migration in caribou and other social ungulates, leading to better predictions of spatial use patterns and responses to changing environmental conditions. Moreover, we anticipate that the protocol we developed here will be broadly applicable to study social behaviour in a wide range of migratory and non-migratory taxa. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Collective movement ecology’

The small matter of the Afrikaans diminutive

The Afrikaans diminutive suffix surfaces as one of four allomorphs determined by complex prosodic and segmental interactions including stem augmentation, stem modification in form of diphthongization, and notably bidirectional place assimilation and segmental deletion. This paper presents an analysis in Harmonic Serialism (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004, McCarthy 2000) that derives the surface allomorphs from an underlying representation /-jki/. The analysis departs from Wissing's (1971) rule-based treatment in rejecting phonologically-conditioned allomorphs in favor of a single underlying form which is subject to phonological derivation and in treating diphthongization as the realization of underlying palatal features following Bye (2013)

Drawing the krtań: Laryngeal alternations in Polish

Polish exhibits the cross-linguistically common processes of final devoicing and voice assimilation. Notably, these target not only obstruents and obstruent clusters, but also certain obstruent-sonorant clusters. This paper argues for an analysis in Harmonic Serialism where sonorants acquire laryngeal nodes, thereby becoming susceptible to the same constraints that act on obstruents. There is an asymmetry between OS#O clusters, which show assimilation, and O#SO clusters, which do not. The analysis captures this asymmetry with positional faithfulness constraints on word-initial sonorants. The analysis also straightforwardly models other patterns in Polish and neatly captures a dialectal difference between Warsaw and Cracow Polish with a single constraint reranking

Majority Rule in Harmonic Serialism

Majority Rule is an unattested process where agreement is controlled by the largest class in the input. As a function from inputs to outputs, Majority Rule requires more computational expressivity than do attested phonological transformations. This paper examines how Majority Rule arises in parallel Optimality Theory and Harmonic Serialism. It is shown that in HS, Majority Rule relies on globally evaluated output constraints, which are known to produce computationally complex pathologies. However, without them, HS is unable to produce iterative harmony at all. We propose adopting directional constraint evaluation in HS as a way of modeling harmony while maintaining local representations

Learning Exceptionality and Variation with Lexically Scaled MaxEnt

A growing body of research in phonology addresses the representation and learning of variable processes and exceptional, lexically conditioned processes. Linzen et al. (2013) present a MaxEnt model with additive lexical scales to account for data exhibiting both variation and exceptionality. In this paper, we implement a learning model for lexically scaled MaxEnt grammars which we show to be successful across a range of data containing patterns of variation and exceptionality. We also explore how the model\u27s parameters and the rate of exceptionality in the data influence its performance and predictions for novel forms