Dissertation - Michael Becker

There is no guarantee, of course, that RCD will manage to install all the constraintsand empty out the Support. When there is no column available that has no L’s in it, RCDwill give up, or stall. In some cases, such as the trivial (hypothetical) example in (137),cloning will not help. The intended winner is harmonically bounded, i.e. no constraintprefers it over the loser, indicating that something else went wrong: The learner made awrong assumption about some underlying representation, for instance. 1(137)Ca. winner ≻ loser LCloning the constraint in (137) wouldn’t help, since making two clones of the constraintwould still leave the intended winner without any constraint that prefers it over the intendedloser. Having both W’s and L’s in a column won’t help either, as in the minimal situationin (138).(138)Ca. winner1 ≻ loser1 Wb. winner2 ≻ loser2 LCloning the constraint in (138), listing winner1 with one clone and winner2 withanother clone, would allow the installation of one clone, removing the first winner-loser1 A harmonically bounded winner can also be unbounded by adding a constraint that prefers the winnerto the loser. Here I assume that a fixed, Universal set of constraints is always available to the learner, so thereis no mechanism for adding constraints as needed beyond cloning. See, however, §4.5.3 for an example ofsubcategorizing constraints to affixes.147