Dissertation - Michael Becker

the first winner-loser pair was created by the grammar IDENT(voice) σ1 ≫ *VÙV, and thesecond winner-loser pair was created by the opposite ranking.(160)*VÙVIDENT(voice) σ1a. aÙ-1 ≻ aÃ-1 L Wb. taÃ-1 ≻ taÙ-1 W LGiven the Support in (160), RCD will not be able to find a constraint that has at least oneW and no L’s in its column. With no constraints to install, the Support cannot be emptiedout, and RCD stalls. In situations like these, constraint cloning can potentially let RCD finda grammar, as explained in the next section.4.3.2 Cloning RCDConstraint cloning (Pater 2006, 2008b) is a mechanism for finding a grammar giveninconsistent language data. Cloning attempts to find a grammar by duplicating an existingconstraint, and making each copy of the original constraint applicable to a subset of thelexical items that appear in the Support. In the simplest case, each winner-loser pair in theSupport contains a unique lexical item, but this assumption is not necessary for successfulcloning.The result of cloning *VÙV in (160) is shown in (161). There are now two clones of*VÙV, and each one has a limited domain: One clone has the lexical item taÙ in its domain,and other clone has aÙ. 4 Additionally, each item in the domain of a clone is annotated forthe constraints that are the source of the conflict, in this case, IDENT(voice) σ1 . For moreabout the need to annotate the domains with conflictors, see §2.4.4.4 The lexical item both winners share, the possessive suffix, is dealt with separately, see below.165