Process-specific constraint effects in BMRS

Abstract

Following earlier work on process-specific constraint (PSC) effects in Palestinian Arabic RTR harmony (Davis, 1995; McCarthy 1997), this squib demonstrates how such effects can be captured with boolean monadic recursive schemes (BMRS; Bhaskar et al, 2020), a logical formalism for analyzing phonological maps. It improves on previous rule-based and optimization-based accounts in the following ways. First, ordered hierarchies of BMRS systems and their preservation under composition naturally derive the Subset Criterion (and avoid certain PSC pathologies), available to OT accounts but not rule-based accounts. Additionally, the restrictive properties of BMRS avoid the typological over-generation of OT analyses of spreading.