On the proper treatment of weak determinism: Subsequentiality and simultaneous application in phonological maps
Eric Meinhardt, Anna Mai, Eric Bakovic, Adam McCollum
November 2020
 

Recent work has claimed that (segmental) phonological patterns are subregular (Heinz 2011a,b, 2018, Heinz and Idsardi 2013), occupying a delimited proper subregion of the regular functions -- the weakly deterministic regular functions (Heinz and Lai 2013, Jardine 2016, McCollum et al. 2020a). Whether or not it is correct, this claim can only be properly assessed given a complete and accurate definition of weak determinism. We propose such a definition in this article, patching unintended holes in Heinz and Lai's (2013) original definition that we argue have led to the incorrect categorization of some phonological patterns as weakly deterministic. Building on Elgot and Mezei's (1965) demonstration that regular functions can be decomposed into two contradirectional subsequential functions, we show that weakly deterministic functions are those for which the composands do not interact in a way that we formally clarify here, making connections with more familiar notions of interaction in the phonological literature.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/005565
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: submitted
keywords: phonology, computational phonology, subregular hierarchy, simultaneous application, interaction, phonology
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