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

Summary

Subregular linguistics often holds that phonological patterns, and more recently syntactic agreement (Hanson, 2025), are tier-based strictly local (TSL), typically with bigram constraints. Mayer and Major (2018) showed that Uyghur backness harmony violates this: dorsal consonants sometimes determine suffix backness and sometimes do not. This theory paper argues that syntax has a parallel exception. Its case study is the omnivorous pattern by which Mundari verbs mark their objects (Murugesan et al., 2025), modeled over c-strings (strings read off tree "spines"). In this pattern, second-person objects, which sit in the middle of a three-level person hierarchy, only sometimes affect the form of the object marker. No plain TSL grammar can express this. The authors show that both Uyghur and Mundari fit an extension called O-TSL. In O-TSL, the decision to project a symbol to the tier can depend on what was most recently projected. The result undercuts the conjecture that agreement is TSL. It also gives concrete support to the idea that phonology and syntax share formal complexity, possibly just above TSL.

Key points

  • The paper first restates a TSL-2 grammar over c-strings for English subject–verb agreement, including existentials and clausal complements and subjects. The tier is {D_sg, D_pl, C, T_-s, T_∅}, and the banned bigrams are D_sg T_∅, D_pl T_-s and C T_∅.
  • In Uyghur, the harmonizing consonants are front k, g and back q, ʁ. These dorsals are irrelevant when a harmonizing vowel is already nearer the suffix on the tier.
  • A (2,2)-O-TSL grammar handles Uyghur. It projects harmonizing consonants only when the last tier symbol is not a harmonizing vowel.
  • The Mundari grammar is exactly analogous. D_2 is projected only if the preceding tier symbol is not D_1. Forbidden bigrams block mismatches between D_1 or D_2 and the agreement markers Ap_A, Ap_B and Ap_C.
  • Standard k-TSL is the special case (1,k)-O-TSL. The authors consider Mundari the strongest known challenge to the view that syntactic constraints are TSL on c-strings. They link this to Graf's (2022) cognitive parallelism hypothesis.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2026.scil-main.13

@inproceedings{verbil2026omnivorous,
  title = {{Omnivorous Agreement, like Uyghur Backness Harmony, is a Challenge for Tier-Based Strict Locality}},
  author = {Verbil, Allison and Hunter, Tim},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.scil-main.13},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.scil-main.13}
}

References

10 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Alëna Aksënova, Thomas Graf, and Sedigheh Moradi. 2016. Morphotactics as tier-based strictly local dependencies. In Proceedings of the 14th sigmorphon workshop on computational research in phonetics, phonology, and morphology, pages 121–130. find
  2. Susana Béjar. 2003. Phi-syntax: A theory of agreement. University of Toronto Toronto, ON. find
  3. Jane Chandlee. 2014. Strictly local phonological processes. University of Delaware. find
  4. Noam Chomsky. 2001. Derivation by phase. In Michael J. Kenstowicz, editor, Ken Hale: A Life in language. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. find
  5. Connor Mayer and Travis Major. 2018. A challenge for tier-based strict locality from uyghur backness harmony. In International conference on formal grammar, pages 62–83. Springer. find
  6. Gurujegan Murugesan, Imke Driemel, and Andrew Murphy. 2025. Omnivorous person, number and gender in Mundari: A cyclic Agree analysis. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. find
  7. Andrew Nevins. 2010. Locality in vowel harmony, volume 55. Mit Press. find
  8. Andrew Nevins. 2011. Multiple agree with clitics: Person complementarity vs. omnivorous number. Natural language & linguistic theory, 29(4):939–971. find
  9. Aniello De Santo and Thomas Graf. 2019. Structure sensitive tier projection: Applications and formal properties. In International conference on formal grammar, pages 35–50. Springer. find
  10. Paul D Fallon. 1993. Liquid dissimilation in georgian. In Eastern States Conference on Linguistics, volume 10, pages 105–116. find

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