Biases in Harmonic Grammar: the road to restrictive learning

In the Optimality-Theoretic learnability and acquisition literature it has been proposed that certain classes of constraints must be biased toward particular rankings (e.g., Markedness » IO-Faith; Specific » General IO-Faithfulness). This paper demonstrates that altering the mode of constraint interaction from strict ranking as in Optimality Theory to additive weighting as in Harmonic Grammar (HG) reduces the number of classes of constraints that must be distinguished by such biases.

[Download paper here] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11049-010-9104-2)