Years ago I saw Nic Danis present an interesting paper where he used relatively simple proofs to demonstrate that two different types of feature systems (one SPE-like , one with a special place node) defined the same inventory of segments, but different sets of natural classes. Later on, Scott Nelson showed me an earlier paper where he compares natural classes generated by privative and equipollent (i.e., binary) feature systems in a few contexts. Nelson’s paper, while model-theoretic, uses a toy inventory of three features and demonstrates (“proves” might be too strong) its observations by exhaustion: he just looks at what the toy system can or can’t do. I recently wrote a squib where I try to prove some of Nelson’s observations more generally. That is, I simply imagine there is a fixed inventory of feature predicates F such that f ∈ F the privative feature f and the equipollent feature +f have exactly the same interpretation. Then,  it is relatively easy to show that privative and equipollent feature systems generate the same set of possible segments for any F we forbid underspecification and inconsistency (i.e., segments which are both +f and −f) in the equipollent system. Thus, any privative feature system defines the same set of segments as some complete, consistent equipollent feature system. At the same time, it is also relatively easy to show that any (non-empty) privative feature system defines a smaller set of natural classes than even a complete, consistent equipollent feature system. A reviewer said everyone knew this already, and I agree the results are sort of intuitive, but they weren’t actually results until now. This squib appears in Radical, with brief commentary from two of my colleagues.

Almost four years ago, I started working on an abstract with Charles Reiss arguing that the implicit “feature minimization” approach to specifying phonological rules was unworkable. At last, this work is accepted to appear in a special issue of Glossa under the title “Get rich quick: Why kids don’t need Occam’s Razor” and we have posted a draft to LingBuzz.

I recently gave a talk at the Canadian Linguistic Association (sort of like the LSA, but Canadian and frankly a lot better because it doesn’t have nearly as many prominent crackpots and cranks) with Charles Reiss on the notion of “exchange rules” as they’re understood in Logical Phonology (LP). Whereas SPE-era theories can use alpha-notation to generate exchange rules, LP can model exchange processes via a series of seemingly complex rules, either via a Duke of York gambit or opportunistic abuse of underspecification. Since it seems quite likely that purely phonological exchanges don’t in fact exist, we suggest that the language acquisition device is constrained so as to not profer analyses of those types, though we also consider that this may be an accident of the “diachronic  filter” of the sort developed by Ju. Blevins, M. Hale, and J. Ohala. The handout is here for those interested, and like other things we’ve been writing about LP, will probably be included in a forthcoming book. One interesting question that we raise, but don’t answer, is what one ought to do about exchanges in Optimality Theory. Alderete (2001), for example, proposes to model them with a family of “anti-faithfulness constraints”. While one could predict the absence of exchanges by eliminating this constraint family, Alderete also uses anti-faithfulness for phenomena other than exchanges, and some of these may be more robustly attested; it’s not clear what ought to be done thus.

References

Alderete, J. 2001. Dominance effects as transderivational anti-faithfulness. Phonology 18: 201-253.

I just gave a talk at NAPhCxiii in Montréal in which I used Logical Phonology to characterize major patterns in noun stem allomorphy. With assiduous use of underspecification, I am able to render these patterns largely exceptionless. The handout is on LingBuzz and LOA here.