Nivkh, a linguistic isolate of Eastern Siberia, displays a typologically uncommon process which affects /e/ in the context of a following uvular consonant, and which reportedly results in palatalisation of the consonant preceding /e/, e.g. /pʰeq/→[pʰʲq]. Phonologically, there are indeed reasonable grounds for analysing the consonants as palatalised. Phonetically, matters are less clear. Acoustic evidence shows that the clearest correlate of palatalisation is a steep and consistent fall of F2 during the realisation of the vowel. The fact that F2 lowering is also typical before uvulars suggests that palatalisation is the result of a perceptually motivated reanalysis, whereby the palatality of /e/ has come to be associated with the preceding consonant, and the vowel has a lowered and retracted reflex.

In the paradigms of certain Tigre verbs, the final stem consonant and the vocalic suffix metathesise in some configurations. In this short paper, this is analysed as a hiatus-resolving strategy. The limits and consequences of this strategy are shown to follow from the representation of verbs, in an analysis conducted within CVCV phonology and Element Theory.

This paper presents a novel approach to capturing exceptional stress that relies on prespecification of foot edges in the input. Focusing on Turkish, this approach accounts for both regular and exceptional stress in a unified manner and within a single grammar, and unlike other approaches, does not overpredict. On this account, Turkish is a footless, but trochaic, language. Both regular and exceptional Turkish morphemes are subject to the same constraint ranking; exceptional morphemes are different only in that they have one or more syllables already footed in the input, although the type of foot (e.g. trochaicity, binarity) is determined by the constraints of the grammar. As regular morphemes vacuously satisfy these constraints (which act on the foot), trochees appear on the surface only if there is an input foot available (i.e. in words with exceptional morphemes), since the grammar itself has no apparatus to parse syllables into feet.

This paper documents and analyses stress and vowel length in Samoan words. The domain of footing, the Prosodic Word, appears to be a root and cohering suffixes; prefixes and most disyllabic suffixes form a separate domain. Vowel sequences that disrupt the normal stress pattern require constraints matching sonority prominence to metrical prominence, sensitive to degree of mismatch and to the number of vowels involved. Two suffixes unexpectedly have an idiosyncratic footing constraint, observable only in a limited set of words. We also discuss trochaic shortening and its asymmetrical productivity, and the marginal contrastiveness of some features in loans. While Samoan does not appear to be typologically unusual, it does offer arguments (i) in favour of alignment constraints on Prosodic Words rather than only on feet directly, and (ii) against simple cyclicity. Some of the strongest evidence comes from stress patterns of the rich inventory of phonotactically licit vowel sequences.