This article re-examines ‘conflicting directionality’ in Japanese mimetic words, a distributional pattern in which palatalisation is preferentially realised on the rightmost of two coronal consonants, but on the leftmost consonant in a word without coronals. Analysis of the original dictionary evidence given in support of this generalisation and an exhaustive search of the Japanese mimetic stratum reveal both several counterexamples to conflicting directionality and the fact that the datasets are far too small to support linguistic generalisation. The theoretical assumptions employed to account for Japanese mimetic palatalisation are thus re-examined, with a focus on clarifying the predictions for future valid examples of conflicting directionality.

Recent work in metrical typology within Optimality Theory has emphasised the rhythmic distribution of stress peaks by reference to clashes and lapses, compared to the more central role of foot constituency characteristic of most previous approaches. One consequence of this emphasis has been the introduction of constraints that require reference to non-adjacent objects in the representation, such as two unstressed syllables plus a word edge or a stress peak. I argue here for a constraint-based approach to metrical typology that permits only strictly local formulations. This approach requires increased reference to foot structure, while maintaining local reference to clashes and lapses. The revised set of constraints predicts a larger set of possible stress systems, but correctly includes an attested iambic pattern excluded by recent theories.

Productive palatalisation is a striking property of Japanese mimetic items. The docking site of the [−anterior] feature is contingent on consonantal place, and rhotics resist palatalisation. Cross-linguistically, consonantal places differ in palatalisability, and palatalised apical rhotics are not preferred. Bringing together the cross-linguistic insights offered by Rose (1997b) and Hall (2000), I offer a new account of Japanese mimetic palatalisation, which crucially appeals to the notion of feature compatibility. The proposed analysis is attractive for two reasons. First, feature compatibility is firmly grounded in robust cross-linguistic tendencies. Second, the analysis covers a much wider range of data than that proposed by Zoll (1996, 1997), which is based on constituent-initial licensing of complex segments. The analysis defended in the present work is thus desirable both cross-linguistically and empirically.

This study investigates whether differences (a) in word-internal morphological structure and (b) in lexical stress patterns are reflected in prosodic constituent structure, by examining duration measurements in Scottish English. In Experiments 1 and 2, at a slow speech rate, stem-final rhymes followed by Level II suffixes were on average 4–6% longer than corresponding strings in monomorphemic words, and 7–8% longer than stem-final rhymes followed by Level I suffixes. These results are consistent with the view that stems preceding Level II suffixes are mapped onto prosodic words in the prosodic representation. Experiment 3 obtained no reliable durational differences, even at a slow speech rate, between the initial syllable rhymes of SS words and SW words, which does not provide evidence for the hypothesis that these different stress patterns are represented as differences in foot structure.