MathSegPhon

MathSehPhon: The mathematics of segmental phonotactics

The goal of this project is to understand the formal properties which shape segment inventories cross-linguistically and to investigate their learnability implications. The project tackles questions such as the following: what is the proper format of the feature co-occurrence constraints which shape segment inventories? Do these constraints satisfy formal restrictions? What are the learnability implications of these restrictions? What are the implications of the classical Richness of the Base assumption? What is the role of contrast in shaping consonant inventories? And how should contrast be properly formalized?