Recursive prosody is not finite-state

Hossep Dolatian, Aniello De Santo, Thomas Graf


Abstract
This paper investigates bounds on the generative capacity of prosodic processes, by focusing on the complexity of recursive prosody in coordination contexts in English (Wagner, 2010). Although all phonological processes and most prosodic processes are computationally regular string languages, we show that recursive prosody is not. The output string language is instead parallel multiple context-free (Seki et al., 1991). We evaluate the complexity of the pattern over strings, and then move on to a characterization over trees that requires the expressivity of multi bottom-up tree transducers. In doing so, we provide a foundation for future mathematically grounded investigations of the syntax-prosody interface.
Anthology ID:
2021.sigmorphon-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Garrett Nicolai, Kyle Gorman, Ryan Cotterell
Venue:
SIGMORPHON
SIG:
SIGMORPHON
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11–22
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigmorphon-1.2
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.sigmorphon-1.2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hossep Dolatian, Aniello De Santo, and Thomas Graf. 2021. Recursive prosody is not finite-state. In Proceedings of the 18th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, pages 11–22, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Recursive prosody is not finite-state (Dolatian et al., SIGMORPHON 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigmorphon-1.2.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigmorphon-1.2.mp4