This page describes the OT Soft files provided to accompany the factorial typologies in the paper Locality in metrical phonology, published in Phonology 26. All linked materials are in simple text format.
For more detailed information about the OT Soft program, see http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/otsoft/.
The following files are tab-delimited text files, for compatibility with spreadsheets. These files are the inputs to OT Soft, listing candidates and their constraint violations. They can be viewed in a browser by simply clicking, or use your browser's download function (such as right-click) to save them to your computer for use with the program.
Note that some spreadsheet programs (such as Microsoft Excel) will automatically convert the disyllabic footing (01) into the numerical value -1 unless that cell is formatted as text.
The first five files list all the footings for words of 2 to 9 syllables that were considered. In these files, only binary iambs are included.
In Unary.txt, only words of length 2 to 5 syllables are included, but unary feet are present. The figures cited in the paper for strictly binary footing of words of this length were generated from the file Unary.txt with FtBin undominated by a priori ranking (see below).
In every input file, one pattern is necessarily coded as the desired winner (the equivalent of left-to-right iambs, End Rule Left), but this does not affect the factorial typology.
For each of these input files there is at least one output file; this is the DraftOutput that OT Soft produces, but is labeled here simply as -output. Other output files created by OT Soft are not included, since the crucial information is found in the draft output.
The output files for the Kager constraints are provided only under the original assumptions. Modifications mentioned in the paper, such as adding *Align-L to Kager (2005), can easily be examined by pasting the relevant column from the Local.txt file into Kager2005.txt and running OT Soft; the candidates are given in the same order in all files (except that Unary.txt has a distinct candidate set).
Local.txt contains the 11 constraints for the local theory advocated in the paper. Please be aware that the file Local-output.txt, with 2210 patterns because it is unconstrained by other assumptions, is very large — nearly 6.9 million characters, well over four thousand pages when opened in Microsoft Word.
Local-EndL.txt eliminates the pairing of End-Rule-L and End-Rule-R, collapsing them as a single L/R parametrised constraint (for 142 languages). The setting L is used in this file.
Local-Contig.txt adds to Local-EndL.txt the constraint Foot-Contiguity-R. The results presented, with 78 languages, have a priori undominated ranking of Parse-2, described below.
The output files are large but organize the information in a consistent manner.
OT Soft identifies candidates that cannot be distinguished by the constraints provided as "a problem with the input file". This list precedes the results of the factorial typology.
Next come the Results of Factorial Typology Search, in numbered sections. The name of the input (source) file is also provided here.
This list repeats the constraints in the input file, with their long and short names.
Here is the crucial number of patterns generated. These are not quite the same as different grammars, since where candidates are not distinguished by the constraints, the same ranking ("grammar") produces more than one possible pattern ("language" in some sense). Each pattern is numbered and presented as a list of outputs for the various word-lengths.
This list indicates whether a particular footing is ever part of a generated pattern. Those marked "no" are harmonically bounded in the constraint set.
This, the longest section of the output file, repeats the numbered patterns from II along with the ranking that favors each pattern, and the candidates that motivate the necessary rankings.
The paper discusses results when Parse-2 is undominated. This outcome is accomplished in OT Soft by means of a priori ranking in which Parse-2 is stipulated to outrank all other constraints. (Typologically, this is the equivalent of deleting from the input file all candidates that have adjacent unparsed syllables.)
The output files with undominated Parse-2 are in addition to the basic outputs for the two Local input files; they are labeled with the label -apriori. (Technically, Local-Contig above is a priori as well for comparison with other numbers; the basic output is not provided here.)
The typologies for a priori Local and Local-EndL yield 136 and 66 languages respectively.
In the a priori output files, section II gives the stipulated rankings (for example, that Parse-2 dominates all other constraints). As a result, the numbers for the remaining sections increase by one: the Summary Information is section III, and so forth.