Dissertation - Michael Becker

After general W’s and L’s were masked from the Support, C2 now has the leastpopulated column. When C2 is cloned, winner3 and winner4 are listed with its clones,leading to the grammar in (154).(154) C1 winner1 ≫ C2 winner3 ≫ C3 ≫ C1 winner2 , C2 winner4This grammar successfully captures the two trends in the data, with each class of lexicalitems listed with only one clone of one constraint.4.2.6 Remaining questionsThe least populated column metric, augmented by the masking mechanism forpreventing double-dipping, were shown to be sufficient for correctly learning lexical trends.The examples shown so far involved conflicts between pairs of constraints. These abstractexamples correspond to the scenarios seen in actual languages in chapters 2 and 3 and inthe rest of this chapter. It is possible, however, that a single lexical trend could involve aconflict between more than two constraints. While such cases are not currently known inhuman languages, they are explored below for the sake of completeness.The simplest form of constraint conflict involves two constraints, but a single conflictcan involve any number of constraints.The tableau in (155) illustrates a conflict thatinvolves four constraints (cf. Pater 2008a for a similar scenario). While no constraint canbe installed in this scenario without cloning, cloning any one of the constraints will solvethe inconsistency.159