Paper

Omnivorous Agreement, like Uyghur Backness Harmony, is a Challenge for Tier-Based Strict Locality 

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Abstract

A well-known exception to the characterization that phonological patterns belong to the subregular class of TSL dependencies is found in Uyghur backness harmony (Mayer and Major, 2018). At the same time, a recent line of work has argued that many long-distance syntactic phenomena are subsumed by the TSL class, revealing an interesting parallel between phonology and syntax. We show that a certain omnivorous syntactic agreement pattern, namely Mundari object agreement (Murugesan et al., 2025), poses the same challenge to TSL as Uyghur backness harmony.

Keywords: Uyghur, vowel harmony, backness harmony, phonology, Mundari, agreement, omnivorous agreement, syntax, subregular hypothesis, formal complexity, TSL, O-TSL

How to Cite:

Verbil, A. & Hunter, T., (2026) “Omnivorous Agreement, like Uyghur Backness Harmony, is a Challenge for Tier-Based Strict Locality ”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 9(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/scil.4028