Allison Verbil


2026

A well-known exception to the characterization that phonological patterns belong to the subregular class of TSL dependencies is found in Uyghur backness harmony (Mayer and Major, 2018). At the same time, a recent line of work has argued that many long-distance syntactic phenomena are subsumed by the TSL class, revealing an interesting parallel between phonology and syntax. We show that a certain omnivorous syntactic agreement pattern, namely Mundari object agreement (Murugesan et al., 2025), poses the same challenge to TSL as Uyghur backness harmony.