Dissertation - Michael Becker

elow any constraints that are already in it, and any winner-loser pairs it assigns a W toare removed from the tableau. Installing constraints continues until all winner-loser pairsare removed. In the case of (98), however, there are no constraints to install, since all thecolumns have both W’s and L’s in them.The solution to this situation was offered by Pater (2006, 2008b), who suggested thata constraint can be cloned to solve the inconsistent ranking of the constraints. Cloning aconstraint means that the learner makes two copies, or clones, of the constraint, and makesboth clones lexically-specific. Clones are lexically-specific in the sense that they apply onlyto the list of lexical items that are associated with them. When a constraint is cloned, everylexical item it assigns a W to is associated with one clone, and every lexical item it assignsan L to is associated with the other clone 14 .In the case at hand, suppose the learner decided to clone LOCAL(o). One clone wouldbe associated with xalón, and the other would be associated with alón (99).(99)LOCAL(o) xalon φ-MATCH LOCAL(o) alona. xalon-ót ≻ *xalon-ím W Lb. alon-ím ≻ *alon-ót W LNow there is a column that only has W’s in it, and there is a constraint to install:LOCAL(o) xalon . Once installed, the first winner-loser pair in (99) is removed, which leavesthe column of φ-MATCH with only W’s in it.φ-MATCH is installed and added to theconstraint ranking below LOCAL(o) xalon , and the second and last winner-loser pair in (99) isremoved. The remaining constraint, LOCAL(o) alon is added to the ranking below φ-MATCH.The result is the grammar in (100), where there are no longer any ranking conflicts.14 This last point is a departure from Pater (2006, 2008b), see §1.1.4 for discussion.101