Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber Syllabification is Quantifier-Free

Abstract

Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber (ITB) is unusual due to its tolerance of non-vocalic syllabic nuclei. Rule-based and constraint-based accounts of ITB syllabification do not directly address the question of how complex the process is. Model theory and formal logic allow for comparison of complexity across different theories of phonology by identifying the computational power (or expressivity) of linguistic formalisms in a grammar-independent way. With these tools, I develop a mathematical formalism for representing ITB syllabification using Quantifier-Free (QF) logic, one of the least powerful logics known. This result indicates that ITB syllabification is relatively simple from a computational standpoint and that grammatical formalisms could succeed with even less powerful mechanisms than are currently accepted.

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