I posted our handout from our NELS talk yesterday here. We illustrate two points: a corrolary of Logical Phonology (LP) called delete the rich, pertaining to segment deletion rules, and how LP handles apparent cases of non-derived environment blocking. In doing so, we give a relatively detailed phonology of Hungarian h and also address the famous case of Turkish velar deletion.
I’ll post the MS for the proceedings to LingBuzz once it’s ready.
My paper with Charles Reiss on metaphony in Logical Phonology is now accepted to appear in a special issue of Phonology. As it happens, it includes problems I originally posed here on this blog (1 2 3). I have also updated the version on LingBuzz to include various changes recommended by the reviewers and editors.
Hayes (1986) proposes the linking constraint, a convention for the interpretation of autosegmental rules. As stated, it holds that association lines should be “interpreted as exhaustive”. In the context of a rule, this means that the target and triggers are not permitted to have additional linkages not mentioned in the rule.
Later in the paper, Hayes makes it clear that this is to be interpreted with respect to whatever tiers are mentioned. For example, imagine a rule that manipulates the melodic/featural tier but is conditioned in part by the CV tier—Hayes adopts CV theory, but the “constraint” is just as applicable to approaches which use an X and/or moraic tier—then the rule does not apply to any susbstring of the melody whose melodies contain associations to the CV tier not mentioned. Similarly, imagine a rule that targets elements on the CV tier but is conditioned in part by the melody: such a rule would not apply to any substring of the CV tier with associations to the melody not explicitly stated in the rule.
I would like to claim that this is all too informal. It should be possible to state the substring that matches the rule using something like first-order logic (FOL), and similarly to translate the change into a logical statement. However, it’s not immediately clear how to write the procedure that translates autosegmental diagrams into the appropriate FOL sentences. (I put aside the encoding of the change: I think this will be comparatively easy.) Autosegmental diagrams itself are essentially an fragment of undirected graph, and translating these into FOL statements is straightforward enough: the description of the graph is defined by the logical conjunction of:
To enforce the linking constraint, one needs to add additional predicates to this conjunction that rule out associations not mentioned. Conceptually, I think of this as an exhaustification function (with apologies for the abuse of terminology) which takes the graph description above and returns the predicates needed to rule out forbidden associations in the relevant subgraphs. While I think I know what these exhaustifying predicates need to be for toy examples, I don’t yet know what the general algorithm is.
I am also somewhat concerned whether phonologists are (were?) applying the linking convention in a vibes-based fashion depending on the example in question, in which case no algorithm could properly describe analytical practices. Finally, I am interested in the feasibility of the opposite approach—a road not taken, as far as I know, in autosegmental theory— whereby undesired associations are ruled out simply by making the rule more explicit.
Does anyone know of any relevant work on this topic? Surely I am not the first person to be bothered by this.
Hayes, B. 1986. Inalterability in CV phonology. Language 62: 321-351.