Abstract A lot of recent work in computational phonology seeks to pinpoint the complexity of phonotactic dependencies from a formal perspective. Numerous mathematical classes have been proposed, but Graf (2017) subsumes them all under the umbrella of interval-based strictly piecewise dependencies (IBSP). IBSP treats all phonological structures as strings that are subject to non-local constraints. Every local dependency is reanalyzed as a non-local constraint that is restricted to a locality domain of bounded size. If all phonotactic dependencies are IBSP, then we should only encounter phenomena that are either local or non-local, but not both. I show that this prediction is not borne out: several attested phenomena combine local and non-local information. However, a more relaxed notion of locality domains allows IBSP to produce these patterns while avoiding overgeneration. The make-up of these relaxed locality domains bears a striking resemblance to c-command in syntax, supporting the idea that phonology and syntax may be closely related on a computational level.
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@InProceedings{ Graf18NELS,
author = {Graf, Thomas},
title = {Locality Domains and Phonological c-Command Over Strings},
year = {2018},
booktitle = {NELS 48: Proceedings of the Forty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society},
editors = {Hucklebridge, Sherry and Nelson, Max},
volume = {1},
url = {http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004080},
pages = {257--270},
publisher = {GLSA},
address = {Amherst, MA}
}