This paper presents an analysis of the relationship between focus and the prosodic word (ω) in English. Using focus as a diagnostic, I will support the position that prosodic structure is built on a separate plane from morphological structure and that certain phonological processes are conditioned by prosodic bracketing (Booij & Rubach 1984, 1987; Nespor & Vogel 1986; Halle & Vergnaud 1987; Cohn 1989; Zec & Inkelas 1990; Kang 1992; Booij & Lieber 1993; Raffelsiefen 1993). More specifically, the proposal is that semantic analysability, focus and ω status coincide in a predictable manner on prefixes.

In this essay I suggest that the conventional bifurcation of geometrically organised feature bundles into ‘Laryngeal’ and ‘Supralaryngeal’ categories, advocated most prominently in the provocative work of Clements (1985, 1987), Sagey (1986) and Archangeli & Pulleyblank (forthcoming), should be modified to eliminate the Supralaryngeal element altogether. Specifically, the proposal is that the category Place and the features of manner be removed from subordination under the Supralaryngeal node, as in the conventional configuration displayed in (1), and instead be subsumed directly under Root, as depicted in (2):1

An experiment showed that Japanese speakers’ judgement of Pokémons’ evolution status on the basis of nonce names is affected both by mora count and by the presence of a voiced obstruent. The effects of mora count are a case of counting cumulativity, and the interaction between the two factors a case of ganging-up cumulativity. Together, the patterns result in what Hayes (2020) calls ‘wug-shaped curves’, a quantitative signature predicted by MaxEnt. I show in this paper that the experimental results can indeed be successfully modelled with MaxEnt, and also that Stochastic Optimality Theory faces an interesting set of challenges. The study was inspired by a proposal made within formal phonology, and reveals important previously understudied aspects of sound symbolism. In addition, it demonstrates how cumulativity is manifested in linguistic patterns. The work here shows that formal phonology and research on sound symbolism can be mutually beneficial.

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.

How exactly do learners generalise in the face of ambiguous data? While there has been a substantial amount of research studying the biases that learners employ, there has been very little work on what sorts of biases are employed in the face of data that is ambiguous between phonological generalisations with different degrees of complexity. In this article, we present the results from three artificial language learning experiments that suggest that, at least for phonotactic sequence patterns, learners are able to keep track of multiple generalisations related to the same segmental co-occurrences; however, the generalisations they learn are only the simplest ones consistent with the data.

This paper gives a moraic analysis of gemination and laryngeal alternations associated with consonant gradation in North Saami. Gradation gives rise to a surface three-way length distinction in consonants, which is essential to understanding length in vowels and diphthongs. It is explained by a system of prosodic rules applying to underlying representations containing only a two-way contrast between geminate and singleton consonants, plus a floating mora present in certain suffixes, which results in surface alternations between extra-long and long or between long and short consonants. An enlightening explanation of quantity alternations is available if one exploits the possibility implicit in moraic theory that the relationship between segments and moras can be surface-contrastive, and we show that recourse to trimoraic syllables is unnecessary, despite the surface three-way length difference. These prosodic alternations also result in shifts in the timing of preaspiration and preglottalisation, as well as loss of these laryngeal specifications.

This paper examines the role of weight in stress assignment in the Portuguese lexicon, and proposes a probabilistic approach to stress. I show that weight effects are gradient, and weaken monotonically as we move away from the right edge of the word. Such effects depend on the position of a syllable in the word, as well as on the number of segments the syllable contains. The probabilistic model proposed in this paper is based on a single predictor, namely weight, and yields more accurate results than a categorical analysis, where weight is treated as binary. Finally, I discuss implications for the grammar of Portuguese.

Consonant harmony involves long-distance featural assimilation, or agreement, of consonants across intervening segments. Current correspondence-based analyses of such sound patterns assume that they originate in the cognitive exigencies of articulatory planning, either synchronically, through the functional grounding of the constraints responsible, or diachronically, whereby processing factors incrementally shape the lexicon over time. This paper challenges the validity of this assumption as an all-purpose functional explanation for the full range of long-distance consonant agreement patterns by demonstrating that a variety of diachronic trajectories underlies their emergence and evolution. Focusing on the comparatively rare phenomenon of secondary articulation agreement, the evolutionary histories of three cases are examined: (labio)velarisation agreement in Pohnpeian (Oceanic), palatalisation agreement in Karaim (Turkic) and pharyngealisation agreement in Tsilhqot'in (Athabaskan). These histories provide explanations for a range of synchronic properties of the systems in question, some of which are problematic for restrictive typologies of consonant harmony.

Acquisition and the lexicon collects revised versions of nineteen primary papers and four commentaries presented at the 5th Conference on Laboratory Phonology, held at Northwestern University in July 1996. It is not possible to do justice to each paper in a collection this large and diverse, so individual papers will be discussed as they relate to three themes that emerge from the book as a whole: (i) the relationship between phonology and speech processing – this volume contains more papers on speech processing than its predecessors in the Laboratory Phonology series, which brings to the forefront questions about the relationship between phonological theory and theories of speech processing; (ii) the phonetics–phonology divide – a number of the phonology papers question the common assumption that phonetics and phonology are separate components of grammar; (iii) frequency effects – results are presented showing effects of the frequency of words and other phonological units in a striking variety of domains.

The theoretical significance of the Bamileke-Dschang tone system has been evident since Tadadjeu (1974) first pointed out the unusual tonal oppositions found in this language. Whereas the majority of languages with tonal downstep permit this entity (!) only between high (or, perhaps more generally, only between non-low) tones, Dschang contrasts H and !H after both high (H) and low (L) tones and also contrasts L and ! L tones as well. The detailed account provided in Hyman & Tadadjeu (1976) has led to further comments, reactions and reanalyses, including Clark (1979), Hyman (1979), Watters Anderson (1980), Stewart (1981), Hyman (1982), Pulleyblank (1982, 1983), and an exchange of letters between M. Halle, S. C. Anderson and myself in 1981–1982.

The term ‘environmental shielding’ has been used to refer to a class of processes in which the phonetic realisation of a nasal stop depends on its vocalic context. In Chiriguano, for example, nasal consonants are realised as such before nasal vowels (/mã/ → [mã]), but acquire an oral release before oral vowels (/ma/ → [mba]). Herbert (1986) claims that shielding protects a contrast between oral and nasal vowels: if Chiriguano /ma/ were realised as [ma], [a] would likely carry some degree of nasal coarticulation, and be less distinct from nasal /ã/. This article provides new arguments for Herbert's position, drawn from a large typological study of South American languages. I argue that environmental shielding is contrast preservation, and that any successful analysis of shielding must make explicit reference to contrast. These results contribute to a growing body of evidence that constraints on contrast are an essential component of phonological theory.

This paper presents an extension of indexed constraints, such that they can apply not only to individual morphemes, but also to potentially complex constituents such as the stem. This modification allows us to capture a class of long-distance morphologically derived environment effects (MDEEs) that have been previously unexplained. MDEEs typically involve an exceptional phonological pattern that is lost under affixation. Formally, MDEEs are predicted if complex constituents such as stems are treated as lexically exceptional only when every morpheme contained within them is independently exceptional. This approach further predicts asymmetries between bare roots and affixed words, between roots and affixes, and between inflected and derived words. All other things being equal, the first of each pair is more likely to be exceptional in more contexts.

An issue which engaged the attention of phonologists following the publication of Halle & Vergnaud's ground-breaking Essay on stress (1987a) was the proper treatment of stress systems in which iterative foot structure is apparently required to locate the main prominence, yet expected secondary stresses are absent in the output. The solution proposed by Halle & Vergnaud was that unwanted secondary stresses are removed by a special repair mechanism, Conflation, accompanied by the automatic erasure of headless feet. The pattern which initially motivated the rule was found to exist in a very few languages: Cairene Arabic (Mitchell 1956, 1960, 1962; Langendoen 1968; McCarthy 1979; Stevens & Salib 1987), Seminole/Creek (Haas 1977; Jackson 1987; Tyhurst 1987) and possibly Palestinian Arabic (Brame 1973; Kenstowicz & Abdul-Karim 1980; Hayes 1995; inter al.).

In Italian certain prepositions (Ps) can appear morphologically combined with articles, inflecting for number and gender. We will dub this the inflected form of the P for the moment, without prejudice as to the analysis of this form:

(1) Sta nella terza camera ‘It's in the third bedroom’ is in/the (fern sg) third bedroom

(2) C' è abbastanza carta sulle scrivanie there is enough paper on/the (fern pi) desks ‘There's enough paper on the desks’

(3) Ci va col vicino there goes with'the (masc sg) neighbour ‘He's going there with his neighbour’

(4) L' ho dato ai ragazzi ‘I gave it to the boys’ it I–have given to/the (masc pi) boys

The inflected form of the P has desinences similar to those found on the articles and the demonstrative adjective quel(lo). These forms are given overleaf in Table I (where only one inflected P is shown, but the forms for the other inflected Ps vary for number and gender in the same way).

An important contribution to our knowledge of tone sandhi among the Chinese dialects is Lü's (1980) article on the tones and tone sandhi behaviour of Danyang, a Wu dialect of Chinese. Lü's description of Danyang is, to date, our only source on the dialect. While it is a northern Wu dialect, the tone sandhi patterning in Danyang differs from Shanghai, Suzhou, Wuxi and other dialects in the vicinity. There are a number of interesting problems related to tone in the dialect. This paper restricts the topic to only one of these problems, namely the treatment of the six basic tone patterns in Danyang, focusing in particular on the pattern in which a contour tone is copied Onto adjacent syllables in the tone sandhi domain.

Templatic morphology involves the appearance of a fixed shape on a morpheme in a specific morphological context. This paper makes two claims: the morphological context of a template is syntactically cyclic, resulting in recursive prosodic word structure, and the shape of a template results from prosodic well-formedness conditions on the internal prosodic word. Templatic morphology in Chukchansi Yokuts illustrates these claims: affixes that trigger templates transfer the root to the phonology before other material is transferred, so that the root forms a prosodic word which is internal to the whole word. Roots with one underlying vowel are augmented to meet a disyllabic minimality requirement on prosodic words; the resulting disyllable forms a light–heavy iamb, to optimally satisfy Chukchansi parsing requirements. Templatic morphology falls out from the predictable interaction of the syntax–phonology interface and general phonological properties of a language, and needs no special apparatus or diacritics.

This paper investigates predictions made by the ‘phonetic knowledge hypothesis’ (Jun 1995, 2004, Hayes & Steriade 2004) about the relation between perceptibility of stops and common patterns of major place assimilation. In two perceptual experiments, stimuli with Russian released and unreleased voiceless stops in clusters were presented for identification of 56 listeners, native speakers of Russian, Canadian English, Korean and Taiwanese Mandarin. Percentages of correct responses and reaction time data were used to determine scales of perceptual salience. Results reveal considerable perceptual differences between places of articulation, consistent across four language groups. Perceptual salience of place of articulation was strongly affected by presence or absence of stop releases. While the salience scale for released stops closely corresponded to cross-linguistic patterns of assimilation, the scale for unreleased stops did not. The results provide partial support for the hypothesis, while suggesting a less direct relation between scales of phonetic difficulty and phonological markedness.

Morphologically conditioned phonology, where a particular phonological alternation or requirement holds only for a subset of lexical items or in a subset of morphological contexts, is well documented. This paper expands on the literature by examining phonological alternations where two independent triggering morphemes must both be present for a phonological alternation to apply. Several cases of doubly morphologically conditioned phonological alternations, from a diverse set of languages, are described. The existence of morphologically conditioned phonology with two triggers informs our models of the interface between morphology and phonology, in that phonological operations must be able to reference the presence of more than one morpheme simultaneously. A range of possible analyses are considered, including those set in Stratal OT, Indexed Constraint Theory, Cophonology Theory and Cophonologies by Phase Theory. A Cophonologies by Phase account is found to be optimal, where multiple morpheme-specific phonological requirements accumulate and co-trigger alternations within a single spell-out domain.

This paper introduces subfeatural representations to capture subphonemic distinctions at work in ‘subphonemic teamwork’. The unusual case of Laal is presented, in which rounding harmony requires two triggers: a round vowel and a labial consonant. The coarticulatory effect of the labial consonant is shown, on the basis of instrumental evidence, to incur a distinctive, but non-contrastive, intermediate level of rounding on the target vowel, analysed as being featurally [−round], but subfeaturally 〚xround〛 (0 < x < 1). 〚xround〛 vowels are shown to form a separate natural class, which can be independently targeted by phonological processes. Subfeatural representations are argued to constitute an advantageous reification of phonetic knowledge, forming a more solid basis for phonetically driven models of phonology. This proposal builds on the insights of previous literature that perceptual representations are needed in phonology, while eschewing the need for direct reference to phonetics.

This paper investigates the phonetic specification of contour tones through a case study of the Mandarin rising tone. The patterns of variation in the realisation of the rising tone as a function of speech rate indicate that its specifications include targets pertaining to both the pitch movement and its end points: the slope of the F0 rise, the magnitude of the rise, and the alignment of the onset and offset of the rise. This analysis implies that the rising tone is overspecified, in that any one of the target properties can be derived from the other three (e.g. slope is predictable from the magnitude and timing of the rise). As a result, the targets conflict, and cannot all be realised. The conflict between tone targets is resolved by a compromise between them, a pattern that is analysed quantitatively by formulating the targets as weighted, violable constraints.