To present my `poster' virtually, I uploaded: - a short slide set for a pitch-talk summarizing the main arguments - a 5-minute video presentation where I walk you through the short slide set *(weirdly enough, many people can only hear the audio if they watch it in the browser -- if you download it, however, the video magically (re)appears!)* - an extended slide set illustrating the claims in more detail I'm available for live Q&A on **jitsi on April 16th, 16:00-17:00**. The meeting link is: https://meet.jit.si/Glow2020LiveQAGradientActivity Alternatively, I'm also looking forward to your questions and comments via the OSF comment section or via email! Eva.Zimmermann@uni-leipzig.de ---------- **Abstract**: The assumption of Gradient Symbolic Representations that phonological elements can have different degrees of activation allows a unified explanation for the typology of phonological exceptions. The crucial theoretical mechanism for exceptional behaviour are gradient constraint violations: The activation of a phonological element in an underlying morpheme representation determines 1) how much the element is preserved by faithfulness constraints and 2) how much it is penalized by markedness constraints. I argue that this simple mechanism predicts the attested typology of phonological exceptions. Two case studies from Molinos Mixtec and Finnish show why such an account should be preferred over alternative analyses of exceptionality. [1]: http://mailto:Eva.Zimmermann@uni-leipzig.de