The Computational Nature of Phonological Generalizations

This chapter studies the nature of the typology of phonological markedness constraints and the nature of the typology of the transformation from underlying to surface forms from a computational perspective. It argues that there are strong computational laws that constrain the form of these constraints and transformations. These laws are currently stated most clearly in terms of the so-called subregular hierarchies, which have been established for stringsets (for modeling constraints) and are currently being established for string-to-string maps (for modeling the transformations). It is anticipated that future research will reveal equally powerful laws applicable to non-string-based representations. Finally, this chapter argues that these laws arise as a natural consequence of how humans generalize from data.