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<Paper uid="J94-1003">
  <Title>One-Level Phonology: Autosegmental Representations and Rules as Finite Automata</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="87" end_page="87" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6. Conclusions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The starting point of this paper was the distinction between descriptions and objects.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Multidimensional phonological structures were taken to be descriptions of classes of phonetic objects, following Wheeler (1981), Bird and Klein (1990), Pierrehumbert (1990), Bird (1990), and Coleman (1992). Multiple tiers could be put together not by a clever encoding but by the simple operation of intersection, which corresponds to logical conjunction. Furthermore, this move of intensionalizing phonology enabled us to provide a straightforward formal basis for adding logical negation and disjunction to our representations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> One important consequence of this work is that there are now good prospects for the incorporation of nonlinear phonology into constraint-based grammar formalisms such as HPSG (Pollard and Sag 1987). Such a move gives rise to a novel view of the relationship between phonology and the other modules of grammar, as some initial investigation has already demonstrated (Bird 1992; Bird and Klein in press). Making surface generalizations the only goal of analysis makes the machine learning of analyses simpler (Ellison forthcoming). The automaton semantics for autosegmental representations and rules gives us a mechanical way of comparing the empirical claims made by a range of autosegmental and segmental accounts of natural language phenomena. Finally, to the extent that phonologists are becoming increasingly committed to a declarative, constraint-based view of their domain, we believe that the model proposed here is well suited to their computational needs.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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