Forgotten Islands of Regularity in Phonology

Open access publication of this volume supported by National Research, Development and Innovation Office grant NKFIH #120145 `Deep Learning of Morphological Structure'.Giving birth to Finite State Phonology is classically attributed to Johnson (1972), and Kaplan and Kay (1994). However, there is an ear- lier discovery that was very close to this achievement. In 1965, Hennie presented a very general sufficient condition for regularity of Turing machines. Although this discovery happened chronologically before Generative Phonology (Chomsky and Halle, 1968), it is a mystery why its relevance has not been realized until recently (Yli-Jyrä, 2017). The antique work of Hennie provides enough generality to advance even today’s frontier of finite-state phonology. First, it lets us construct a finite-state transducer from any grammar implemented by a tightly bounded one- tape Turing machine. If the machine runs in o(n log n), the construction is possible, and this case is reasonably decidable. Second, it can be used to model the regularity in context-sensitive derivations. For example, the suffixation in hunspell dictionaries (Németh et al., 2004) corresponds to time-bounded two-way computations performed by a Hennie machine. Thirdly, it challenges us to look for new forgotten islands of regularity where Hennie’s condition does not necessarily hold.Hennie presented a very general sufficient condition for regularity of Turing machines. This happened chronologically before Generative Phonology (Chomsky & Halle 1968) and the related finite-state research (Johnson 1972; Kaplan & Kay 1994). Hennie’s condition lets us (1) construct a finite-state transducer from any grammar implemented by a linear-time Turing machine, and (2) to model the regularity in context-sensitive derivations. For example, the suffixation in hunspell dictionaries (Németh et al. 2004) corresponds to time-bounded two way computations performed by a Hennie machine. Furthermore, it challenges us to look for new forgotten islands of regularity where Hennie’s condition does not necessarily hold.Peer reviewe