In this article I provide an account of the durative aspect morpheme in Tawala, an Austronesian language spoken in Papua New Guinea. Within the framework of Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1993a, Prince & Smolensky 1993), I show that the three different reduplicant shapes, previously accounted for through the use of three separate templates, actually arise from the dynamic between the drive to copy, in terms of reduplication, and the drive to dissimilate at the level of the syllable. Central to my analysis is *REPEAT (Yip 1995, 1998), a constraint prohibiting identical adjacent syllables between the reduplicant and its stem.

Current models of laryngeal licensing allow as many laryngeal contrasts within a syllable as there are segments, at least in principle. We show here that natural languages are much more economical in their use of laryngeal contrasts than segmental models would lead us to expect. Specifically, we show that voicing, aspiration and glottalisation occur at most once per onset, nucleus or coda in a given language, and that the order in which they are produced within onset, nucleus and coda is never contrastive. To account for these restrictions, we propose that laryngeal features are properties not of segments, but of the onsets, nuclei and codas that dominate them.

The Buchan Scots dialect of north-east Scotland exhibits a unique phonological phenomenon: vowel harmony is blocked by intervening consonants that have no secondary articulation or other obvious characteristic that should make them opaque to harmony. In this paper, I describe the harmony and blocking pattern based on new data from speakers of the modern dialect. After establishing this as a phonological rather than phonetic effect, I propose a synchronic analysis of the pattern and a phonetic explanation for the origin of this unusual sound pattern.

It is well established that the tonal system of Yoruba involves the asymmetric marking or retention of certain tones and the absence or loss of others. The behaviour of Yoruba's three tones is scalar but non-linear, with H tones being the most stable and M tones being the most unstable. In this note, it is shown that previous accounts of the asymmetries in terms of underspecification are problematic, arguing instead for the incorporation of tonal markedness directly into the formulation of faithfulness constraints.