All dissimilation is computationally subsequential

This article presents a computational analysis of the 185 dissimilation patterns in the typological surveys by Suzuki (1998) and Bennett (2013), and shows that dissimilation is computationally less complex than has been previously shown. Dissimilation patterns are grouped into three general types (basic, blocking, and polarity), each of which can be modeled with a subsequential finite-state transducer. This lends support to the claim that phonological patterns are not only regular, but in fact subsequential, which is a more restrictive class of patterns computationally and provides a stronger bound on the types of processes expected in natural language phonology.