Dissertation - Michael Becker

The cloning subroutine in described formally in (163).It starts by identifyingconstraints that are more general than the constraint to clone (163a). This is done becauseW’s and L’s from general constraints will have to be masked, as described in §4.2.5. Twoclones are made, one to collect winners that are assigned a W by the constraint to clone,and one for winners that are assigned an L (163b). Each clone is simply a copy of theoriginal constraint, i.e. it is the same function from linguistic objects to violation marks.Once copied, the clones are given the empty set as their domain (163c), which means thatthey no longer assign violation marks to any linguistic object. The clones are added to theSupport (163d), and since their domains are empty, their columns don’t have any W’s orL’s in them. Now, winners that get W’s or L’s from the original constraints are dividedbetween the clones. As the algorithm is stated here, the whole winner is put in the domainof a clone, rather than some morpheme(s) inside it. The issue of finding the morphemes thatare responsible for the conflicting ranking arguments is discussed in §4.3.3 below. Startingwith winners that the original constraint assigns a W to (163e), each winner is added to thedomain of the W-collecting clone (163e-i), which causes the W-collecting clone to assigna W to the winner. Each winner is also annotated with a reference to the constraint(s) thatcaused the conflict, i.e. the constraint(s) that assign an L to the winner (163e-ii). Finally,if there are more general constraints that assign W’s to the winner, those W’s are maskedfrom the Support, as explained in §4.2.5. The same procedure applies to the winners thatthe original constraint assigns an L to (163f), but with the W’s and L’s switched around.After the clones are properly created, the original constraint is removed from the Support(163g).(163) Cloning subroutine (preliminary version, see final version in (167))Given a support S and a constraint to clone C ∈ S,a. general constraints := constraints that assign a superset of the W’s and L’sthat C assigns.168