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Positional licensing, asymmetric trade-offs and gradient constraints in Harmonic Grammar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2018

Aaron Kaplan
Aaron Kaplan*
Affiliation:
University of Utah
*
E-mail: a.kaplan@utah.edu.
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Abstract

In Harmonic Grammar, positional licensing interacts with faithfulness constraints in pathological ways: spreading a feature to a licensing position to satisfy positional licensing can incur many faithfulness violations, and if there are sufficiently many such violations, they gang up to block spreading. This problem is solved if positional licensing is recast as a positive constraint that rewards licensed features in proportion to the number of positions they are associated with, thereby countering faithfulness's multiple violations. This proposal provides support for positive constraints, calls into question arguments against gradient constraints and lays the groundwork for a sound theory of positional licensing in Harmonic Grammar.

Type
Articles
Information
Phonology , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , May 2018 , pp. 247 - 286
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

I am grateful to the following people for their insightful comments during the development of this work: Abby Kaplan, Wendell Kimper and Rachel Walker, and audiences at AMP 2015, the 37th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) and the University of Utah. Thanks also to an associate editor and three anonymous reviewers at Phonology, whose comments greatly improved this paper.

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