Phonological processes tend to involve local dependencies, an observation that has been expressed explicitly or implicitly in many phonological theories, such as the use of minimal symbols in SPE and the inclusion of primarily strictly local constraints in Optimality Theory. I propose a learning-based account of local phonological processes, providing an explicit computational model. The model is grounded in experimental results that suggest children are initially insensitive to long-distance dependencies and that as their ability to track non-adjacent dependencies grows, learners still prefer local generalisations to non-local ones. The model encodes these results by constructing phonological processes starting around an alternating segment and expanding outward to incorporate more phonological context only when surface forms cannot be predicted with sufficient accuracy. The model successfully constructs local phonological generalisations and exhibits the same preference for local patterns that humans do, suggesting that locality can emerge as a computational consequence of a simple learning procedure.

Marlo et al. (2015) claim that Kuria verbal tone morphology undermines three well-established principles of locality and modularity: (1) Phonological Locality: the assumption that rules and constraints may only evaluate a small window of phonological objects; (2) Cyclic Locality: the stratal organization of morphophonology into stems, words and phrases; and (3) Indirect Reference: the claim that phonological rules and constraints cannot directly access morphosyntactic information. Sande et al. (2020) turn this claim into an argument for a new model of the morphosyntax–phonology interface, Cophonologies by Phase, which erases the separation between phonology and morphology and abandons standard locality domains in favour of syntactic phases. In this article, I show that the conclusions of both articles are unfounded: the Kuria data follow naturally from an analysis based on autosegmental tone melodies in a version of Stratal Optimality Theory which embraces all three restrictions, Phonological and Cyclic Locality and Indirect Reference, the latter implemented by Coloured Containment Theory. I argue that this approach obviates the technical and conceptual objections raised by Marlo et al. against a tone-melody analysis of Kuria, and makes more restrictive predictions about possible systems of tonal morphophonology compared to construction phonology frameworks.

This paper investigates nga-marked numerals in Albanian. They qualify as distributive numerals, since the presence of nga on the numeral yields a distributive reading of the sentences they belong to. Beyond their differences, most of the previous accounts rely on the hypothesis that distributive numerals introduce some kind of semantic feature, e.g. a covariation feature; an evaluation plurality requirement, also called a post-suppositional plurality requirement; or a distributivity force. Our main claim goes against this trend of thinking. We propose that distributive numerals do not carry any semantic feature but only a formal syntactic feature that needs to enter a syntactic dependency relation with a distributivity feature. The analysis is implemented in terms of Zeijlstra’s (2004) upward agree.

Amuzgo (Otomanguean: Mexico) has a large inventory of lexically arbitrary tonal inflection classes in person/number paradigms, where inflectional tones overwrite the root's lexical tone. In causatives, however, inflectional tones are predictable from phonological properties of the root, primarily lexical tone. The inertness of root inflection classes in causatives is argued to follow from cyclicity: once the causative Voice head triggers spell-out, lexical inflection-class specifications are no longer visible, and only phonological information can condition allomorphy in the outer domain of person/number agreement. The grammatical behaviour of inflectional tone thus reflects its structural morphosyntactic position, as distinct from its linear phonological one. I distinguish between several possible analyses of phonologically conditioned tonal-overwriting allomorphy, and propose that the Amuzgo case involves constraint-mediated competition among a priority-ranked list of allomorphs in the input, rather than creation of tonal allomorph candidates purely within the phonology or subcategorisation frames in the lexical representations of allomorphs.

This article posits a theory of iterative stress that separates each facet of the stress map into its constituent parts, or ‘atoms’. Through the well-defined notion of complexity provided by Formal Language Theory, it is shown that this division of the stress map results in a more restrictive characterisation of iterative stress than a single-function analysis does. While the single-function approach masks the complexity of the atomic properties present in the pattern, the compositional analysis makes it explicitly clear. It also demonstrates the degree to which, despite what appear to be significant surface differences in the patterns, the calculation of the stress function is largely the same, even between quantity-sensitive and quantity-insensitive patterns. These stress compositions are limited to one output-local function to iterate stress, and a small number of what I call edge-oriented functions to provide ‘cleanup’ when the iteration function alone fails to capture the pattern.

The relationship between the wh-remnant and the null correlate in the type of ellipsis known as backward sprouting is superficially almost identical to the relation between a wh-filler and a gap in a wh-question. In both cases, there is a dependency between the wh-phrase and a later null element. We conduct a sentence acceptability experiment to test whether the remnant–correlate dependency in backward sprouting exhibits two well-known properties of a filler–gap dependency in wh-questions: sensitivity to clause boundaries (distance) and sensitivity to islands. The results show that both dependency types are sensitive to clause boundaries, although the effect is larger in the case of filler–gap dependencies, but that only filler–gap dependencies are sensitive to islands. These results present a challenge to analyses of sprouting in which the ellipsis site contains a full representation of the structure of the antecedent clause, since such analyses predict island-sensitivity for remnant–correlate dependencies. The results also suggest that island-sensitivity cannot be reduced to simple processing demands without regard to the syntactic representation of the dependency, since such a view would predict greater similarity between filler–gap dependencies and remnant–correlate dependencies than is found.

The way late imperial political elites in China positioned themselves in the tianxia—their life world—can be described as a balance between polity and locality, which was often accompanied by an enduring sense of local identity. This article argues that despite the fall of the tianxia concept in modern China, the age-old locality–polity relationship and the elite local identity did not disappear. Taking the flourishing local gazetteer production of the Republican era as a case, I suggest that instead of suppressing locality, the crisis of the polity and the coming of the nation-state in China brought it more to the foreground. The decline of locality in China's political culture occurred only after the communist takeover. The study makes use of the Local Gazetteer Research Tools (LoGaRT) developed by Max Planck Institute for the History of Sciences.

We take Carnap’s problem to be to what extent standard consequence relations in various formal languages fix the meaning of their logical vocabulary, alone or together with additional constraints on the form of the semantics. This paper studies Carnap’s problem for basic modal logic. Setting the stage, we show that neighborhood semantics is the most general form of compositional possible worlds semantics, and proceed to ask which standard modal logics (if any) constrain the box operator to be interpreted as in relational Kripke semantics. Except when restricted to finite domains, no modal logic characterizes exactly the Kripkean interpretations of $\Box $ . Moreover, we show that, in contrast with the case of first-order logic, the obvious requirement of permutation invariance is not adequate in the modal case. After pointing out some known facts about modal logics that nevertheless force the Kripkean interpretation, we focus on another feature often taken to embody the gist of modal logic: locality. We show that invariance under point-generated subframes (properly defined) does single out the Kripkean interpretations, but only among topological interpretations, not in general. Finally, we define a notion of bisimulation invariance—another aspect of locality—that, together with a reasonable closure condition, gives the desired general result. Along the way, we propose a new perspective on normal neighborhood frames as filter frames, consisting of a set of worlds equipped with an accessibility relation, and a free filter at every world.