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Intersecting Constraint Families: An Argument for Harmonic Grammar
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2026
Abstract
In the analysis of free variation in phonology, we often encounter the effects of INTERSECTING CONSTRAINT FAMILIES: there are two independent families of constraints, each of which has a quantifiable effect on the outcome. A challenge for theories is to account for the patterns that emerge from such intersection. We address three cases: Tagalog nasal substitution, French liaison/elision, and Hungarian vowel harmony, using corpus data. We characterize the patterns we find as across-the-board effects in both dimensions, restrained by floor and ceiling limits. We analyze these patterns using several formal frameworks, and find that an accurate account is best based on HARMONIC GRAMMAR (in one of its two primary quantitative implementations). Our work also suggests that certain lexical distinctions treated as discrete by classical phonological theory (e.g. ‘h-aspiré’ vs. ordinary vowel-initial words of French) are in fact gradient and require quantitative treatment.
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- Copyright © 2019 Linguistic Society of America
Footnotes
*
We would like to thank Andy Lin of UCLA's statistical consulting group for help without which the project would not have been feasible. Giorgio Magri kindly formulated and proved the theorem we use in §3.8. We also thank for their helpful advice Arto Anttila and Paul Smolensky, as well as audiences at the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (Santa Cruz), the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (Cornell), the UCLA-USC phonology seminar, Seoul National University, and Yale University. The authors take full responsibility for remaining errors.
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