Phonological elements can be positionally licensed such that they occur in particular positions and not elsewhere. We focus on two dimensions of variation in violable constraint-based analyses of positional licensing patterns here, following Jesney (2016): the type of constraint that (in)directly references licensing positions (markedness, faithfulness, or both) and the type of interaction between constraints (numerical weighting, as in Harmonic Grammar, or hierarchical ranking, as in Optimality Theory). We elucidate the formal and typological similarities and differences among systems that vary along these dimensions, based on an analysis of a representative set of systems. We then sketch how our results might be generalized to all violable constraint-based systems, given that any constraint that mentions two or more elements can be framed as a constraint on one element (the ‘filler’) in the context of the other(s) (the ‘role’), the latter playing the part of the ‘positions’ in the positional licensing systems.

(The first part of this work was presented as a poster at AMP 2020. Here are the abstract, poster, and 5-min. video that we created for that presentation.)