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Feature Resolution by Lists: The Case of French Coordination Read chapter Read first chapter

2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

A Challenge for Tier-Based Strict Locality from Uyghur Backness Harmony

Authors : Connor Mayer, Travis Major

Published in: Formal Grammar 2018

Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

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Abstract

In this paper we describe the process of backness harmony in Uyghur, where suffix forms are determined first from the backness of certain vowels in the stem, or, if no such vowels are present, from the backness of dorsals in the stem. We show that this pattern cannot be captured by a tier-based strictly local (TSL) language. This is problematic for the weak subregular hypothesis, which claims that all segmental phonological stringsets are TSL languages. Next, we consider an alternative phonological analysis that is compatible with a TSL representation, but empirically unsupported. Finally, we consider the possibility that Uyghur backness harmony might be a lexicalized pattern, and find some suggestive evidence in support of this. This alternative appears to be the most likely way in which Uyghur backness harmony might, in principle, turn out to be compatible with the hypothesis that TSL languages provide an upper bound on phonological learnability.

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Footnotes
1
The strong subregular hypothesis claims that phonological stringsets are either strictly local (SL) or strictly piecewise (SP) languages [20]. Some autosegmental processes like stress have been claimed to be fully regular (e.g. [17]), though there is debate on whether alternative analyses are possible [20].
 
2
These can equivalently be formulated as licit substrings.
 
3
Note that these vowels are the only ones in the system that have no counterparts differing only in backness. Because /e/ only occurs in loanwords and as the result of certain phonological processes, we focus primarily on /i/ throughout the paper.
 
4
The velar sounds /x/ and / https://static-content.springer.com/image/chp%3A10.1007%2F978-3-662-57784-4_4/469137_1_En_4_IEq46_HTML.gif / do not harmonize.
 
5
There is a statistical tendency for such stems to be treated as back.
 
6
This can be shown by induction: both words contain the same subsequences when \(k = 1\), and the subsequences added with each increase in k will be the k-subsequences generated by prepending \(V_f\) or \(V_b\) to all subsequences of length \(k-1\).
 
7
We also suggest that SS-TSL might be relabeled as input structure-sensitive tier-based strictly local (ISS-TSL).
 
8
Uyghur has a process of vowel lenition that can occur adjacent to voiceless consonants: e.g. speaker 1 produced /iʃ/ with a vowel while speaker 2 did not, and speaker 2 produced /it/ with a vowel while speaker 1 did not.
 
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Metadata
Title
A Challenge for Tier-Based Strict Locality from Uyghur Backness Harmony
Authors
Connor Mayer
Travis Major
Copyright Year
2018
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Book
Formal Grammar 2018

Print ISBN: 978-3-662-57783-7

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-662-57784-4

Copyright Year: 2018

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-57784-4_4

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