<OT> New Posting: ROA-785

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 785-1205

Fundamental Properties of Harmonic Bounding

Vieri Samek-Lodovici <ucljvsl at ucl.ac.uk>
Alan Prince <prince at ruccs.rutgers.edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=785


Abstract:
Candidate sets are typically unbounded in size, but the
set of distinct possible optima is inevitably finite. Almost
all candidates are 'losers', doomed never to surface because
under any ranking there are superior alternatives. Such
losers are said to be 'harmonically bounded'. In its most
general form, the harmonic bounding of a candidate is a
collective effect: under every ranking some member of the
bounding set is guaranteed to beat the bounded candidate,
but different members may be responsible for defeating it
under different rankings (Samek-Lodovici and Prince 1999,
ROA-363.). In this paper we focus attention on the space
of violation profiles, which is precisely what OT sees of
linguistic structure. Suppose, as is typically the case,
that the analyst has identified a set of violation profiles.
The problem is to determine the regions of violation space
that are bounded, simply and collectively, by that set.
Concretely, this amounts to characterizing the types of
candidates that are bounded by the candidates we have on
hand. We show how all bounding effects, no matter how complex,
reduce to simple, noncollective bounding when the original
set is augmented by 'bounding minima'. We present and justify
an algorithm which calculates the bounding minima associated
with any set of profiles.

Comments: Updated version of RuCCS Technical Report TR-71.
Keywords: harmonic bounding, candidate set, optima, losers, winners
Areas: Formal Analysis
Type: Manuscript

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=785