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Paper

Learning tone sandhis in Structural Optimality

Authors
  • Izabel Ilie (University College London)
  • Andrew Lamont (University College London)
  • Brandon Prickett (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Abstract

This paper examines the learnability of different types of tone sandhi in Structural Optimality (Mortensen, 2006), a constraint-based framework that posits hierarchical scales and defines constraints over the scales. Approached as a hidden structure problem, we show that Expectation Driven Parameter Learning (Jarosz, 2015) can acquire these grammars, but that their properties can make learning difficult.

Keywords: phonology, tone, chain shift, learning, parameters, constraints

How to Cite:

Ilie, I., Lamont, A. & Prickett, B., (2026) “Learning tone sandhis in Structural Optimality”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 9(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/scil.4037

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Published on
2026-06-26

Peer Reviewed

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0