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Structure Sensitive Tier Projection: Applications and Formal Properties

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Formal Grammar (FG 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11668))

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Abstract

The subregular approach has revealed that the phonological surface patterns found in natural language are much simpler than previously assumed. Most patterns belong to the subregular class of tier-based strictly local languages (TSL), which characterizes them as the combination of a strictly local dependency with a tier-projection mechanism that masks out irrelevant segments. Some non-TSL patterns have been pointed out in the literature, though. We show that these outliers can be captured by rendering the tier projection mechanism sensitive to the surrounding structure. We focus on a specific instance of these structure-sensitive TSL languages: input-local TSL (ITSL), in which the tier projection may distinguish between identical segments that occur in different local contexts in the input string. This generalization of TSL establishes a tight link between tier-based language classes and ISL transductions, and is motivated by several natural language phenomena.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A comment regarding edge markers. For S to be k-local, it needs to contain only factors of length k. Thus, strings are augmented with enough edge markers to ensure that this requirement is satisfied. However, it is often convenient to shorten the k-factors in the definition of strictly k-local grammars and write down only one instance of each edge marker. with the implicit understanding that it must be augmented to the correct amount. So \(\rtimes \rtimes a\) is truncated to \(\rtimes a\). We adopt this simpler notation throughout the paper, unless required to make a definition clearer.

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Acknowledgments

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-1845344.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, USA

    Aniello De Santo & Thomas Graf

Authors
  1. Aniello De Santo
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  2. Thomas Graf
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Correspondence to Aniello De Santo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Trento, Povo, Italy

    Raffaella Bernardi

  2. Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany

    Greg Kobele

  3. LORIA, Inria Nancy, Villers-lès-Nancy, France

    Sylvain Pogodalla

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De Santo, A., Graf, T. (2019). Structure Sensitive Tier Projection: Applications and Formal Properties. In: Bernardi, R., Kobele, G., Pogodalla, S. (eds) Formal Grammar. FG 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11668. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-59648-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-59648-7_3

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