This paper uses novel data showing gradient labial harmony in Kazakh to compare Kaun's (1995) feature-based analysis with a dispersion-based analysis in a Maximum Entropy Harmonic Grammar. The paper demonstrates that the dispersion-based analysis better fits the Kazakh data than Kaun's analysis, and then extends it to account for four languages with harmony patterns different from that in Kazakh. The paper also argues that the dispersion-based account provides a better analysis of the typology of labial harmony than Kaun's feature-based analysis.

This paper provides an analysis of the reduplicative systems of Bugotu, Cheke Holo, Tuvaluan and Hoava. In Bugotu and Cheke Holo, intervocalic consonants are not reflected in the reduplicative substring; Tuvaluan reduplication creates initial geminate consonants, while Hoava reduplicants include coda consonants. Blevins (2003, 2005) argues that these languages pose a serious problem for the optimality-theoretic hypothesis of the Emergence of the Unmarked (McCarthy & Prince 1994), which predicts that reduplicated structures should not favour relatively marked outputs. I show that the data in fact are not problematic for the Emergence of the Unmarked hypothesis, because different, conflicting dimensions of markedness can arise in reduplicative phonology. In Bugotu and Cheke Holo, the tolerance of extrasyllabic segments combined with size-penalising constraints helps produce the consonant-deletion pattern. A similar defence of the Emergence of the Unmarked is offered for the reduplicative systems of Tuvaluan and Hoava.

This paper deals with the domains of some phonological rules of Baule, a Bia language of the Central Tano group (Stewart 1989) spoken in Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa. Like the other languages in this group, Baule has phonological Low and High tones, and a Low tone lowers the register of following High tones – the phenomenon widely referred to as downdrift. But Baule is distinguished from other members of the Central Tano group (and, indeed, from other downdrifting languages that we have studied) in that, within specified domains, sequences of two or more High tones exhibit a rise in pitch over the sequence.

In this paper we show that the occurrence of the rising pattern over High-tone sequences helps to make a clear distinction in Baule between the prosodic word and the morphological word, in line with the results of Selkirk (1980), Nespor & Vogel (1986), Inkelas (1990) and others. We motivate the Baule prosodic word as a phonological constituent whose delimitation is based on the morphological word, but with modifications based on language-particular syntactic, morphological and phonological considerations. Baule prosodic words include, along with simple morphological words that are lexical items in the language, compounds, proper names, noun+adjective and noun+numeral constructions. Other prosodic words are formed by affixing monosyllabic elements (including pronouns, nouns and numerals) to adjacent lexical units.

The Northwest Caucasian language Kabardian displays a typologically unusual process of word formation, whereby two lexical roots fuse to form a single prosodic word whose phonological behaviour is parallel to prosodic words containing a single root. It is shown that this process of fusion, which is subject to a number of phonological and morphosyntactic restrictions, reflects a typologically unusual response to a cross-linguistically common minimal word requirement banning monomoraic prosodic words. Rather than employing segmental lengthening or insertion to ensure that minimality is satisfied, Kabardian chooses to violate the one-to-one mapping between grammatical and prosodic words. A further complication is the scalar nature of minimality in Kabardian: while the impossibility of fusion in certain prosodic and morphosyntactic contexts allows monomoraic prosodic words to surface, a more stringent minimality restriction ensures that all prosodic words have at least one mora.

Theories of stress assignment commonly assume that syllable onsets do not determine a syllable's ability to attract stress. In the frameworks of McCarthy (1979) and Hayes (1981, 1995), for example, only the rhyme is projected in order to determine the weight of a syllable. In Moraic Theory (Hyman 1985), onsets do not contribute to the weight of a syllable as a consequence of the Onset Creation rule, by which onsets lose their weightbearing unit. In the framework of Hayes (1989), the rule of Weight-by-Position ensures that only coda consonants can ever be weight-bearing.

This study uses an artificial language learning experiment and computational modelling to test Kiparsky's claims about Maximal Utilisation and Transparency biases in phonological acquisition. A Maximal Utilisation bias would prefer phonological patterns in which all rules are maximally utilised, and a Transparency bias would prefer patterns that are not opaque. Results from the experiment suggest that these biases affect the learnability of specific parts of a language, with Maximal Utilisation affecting the acquisition of individual rules, and Transparency affecting the acquisition of rule orderings. Two models were used to simulate the experiment: an expectation-driven Harmonic Serialism learner and a sequence-to-sequence neural network. The results from these simulations show that both models’ learning is affected by these biases, suggesting that the biases emerge from the learning process rather than any explicit structure built into the model.

Certain optional phonological processes may apply to any number of the potential targets in a form, yielding outputs in which the process applies to a proper subset of the available loci. Such patterns are incompatible with OT-based frameworks that produce variation by providing multiple constraint rankings. While one ranking may favour exhaustive application and another no application, no ranking favours application at just some loci. The framework presented here, Markedness Suppression, solves this problem: eval may ignore any violation mark assigned by designated markedness constraints, creating variation by manipulating candidates' violation profiles. By ignoring different violation marks on different evaluations, the full range of attested forms is produced, including ones with intermediate levels of process application. Markedness Suppression achieves better empirical coverage than competing frameworks, in terms of both producing the correct range of variants and modelling their output frequencies.

Syntactic juncture has been a topic of interest in phonological theory in recent years. One major issue addressed in the study of syntactic juncture is how to predict from syntactic structure the domains of phrase-level rules of the phonology, or prosodic structure. Many, including Selkirk (1978, 1984, 1986), Nespor & Vogel (1982) and Hayes (1984), propose that utterances are organised in a prosodic hierarchy, determined by but not isomorphic to syntactic structure. In work by these authors, algorithms for determining the relationship between syntactic structure and prosodic structure have been proposed, leading to a deeper understanding of prosodic phrasing.

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.

In his recent bid for the presidency of the Association for Mathematics of Language, Makoto Kanazawa writes:*

Most languages with labial-velar stops (i.e. // and //) have both the voiced and voiceless versions, but several dozen languages have only // or only //. Examination of the stop inventories of such languages reveals that in languages which have only // there are always other gaps in the stop inventory, but languages which have only // usually have a full set of other stops, showing that there is a different historical mechanism involved. Also, ‘//-only’ languages are more common than ‘//-only’ languages, despite the cross-linguistic tendency to favour voiceless stops. Comparative studies show that ‘//-only’ languages are often a result of a merger of * and * into //. I propose that this merger is a result of three phonetic characteristics of the phonologically voiceless //, qualities typical of voiced obstruents. Since * is already partly in the ‘voiced camp’, I hypothesise that hearers interpret it as voiced.

Generative phonological research has typically relied heavily on gratuitous assumptions about the particular morphemic decompositions that are by convention treated as data, about the relevance of those decompositions to the determination of underlying forms, and about the individuation of linguistic phenomena. I discuss a number of topics that take on a different complexion when these gratuitous assumptions are avoided: the identification of particular segments as making up underlying forms, which is far more problematic than has hitherto been recognised; various prior studies that can be interpreted as showing that ‘Vowel Shift’, while playing some role in the competence of speakers of English, has much less generality than standard tenets of generative phonology would lead one to expect; and individual variation in perceived morphemic relations among words. I report on an experiment that demonstrates the existence of such variation and provides evidence for individual differences in the system of vowel alternations and in the status of vowel shift alternations in that system.

Shattuck-Hufnagel (1986) (henceforth S-H), in discussing the significance of ‘slips of the tongue’ for a model of processing, is particularly concerned with attempting to establish to what extent some of the constructs posited by phonologists in their characterisations of phonological structure can be shown to have a role in the planning of speech production. On the basis of the ‘MIT corpus’ of errors (collected by Merrill Garrett and herself), particularly those involving vowels, she argues for a role in planning for aspects of syllable structure, placement of lexical stress, and distinctions and dimensions such as those commonly captured by feature notations. My concern here is with some further aspects of syllable structure: I shall suggest that her data provide support for even more detailed structural properties than are proposed by S-H herself; indeed, that one uncertainty in assessing the significance of the data can be resolved by an independently motivated analysis of subsyllabic structure. I shall not repeat here the details of the classification of errors on which S-H's discussion is based (1986: §1); what is significant in the present context is that errors of various types provide a motivation for particular subsyllabic units.

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.

This paper describes and analyses the vowel-harmony system of the Kordofanian language Moro. Moro has a cross-height dominant-recessive raising harmony system in which high vowels and a central mid vowel trigger harmony, while peripheral mid vowels and a central low vowel are harmony targets. Schwas can co-occur with any of the vowels, appearing inert to harmony. Yet when schwas occur alone in a morpheme, some trigger harmony and some do not. We suggest that an original ATR-harmony system shifted to a height system via merger and centralisation, producing two distinct central vowels, rather than a single schwa. One vowel patterns with the higher vowels in triggering harmony, and the other patterns with the lower vowels. We also propose that a particle-based representation offers the best characterisation of the groupings of target and trigger vowels in the language.

Metres are typically classified as being accentual (mapping stress, as in English) or quantitative (mapping weight, as in Sanskrit). This article treats the less well-studied typology of hybrid accentual-quantitative metres, which fall into two classes. In the first, stress and weight map independently onto the same metre, as attested in Latin and Old Norse. In the second, stress and weight interact, such that weight is regulated more strictly for stressed than unstressed syllables, as illustrated here by new analyses of Dravidian and Finno-Ugric metres. In both of these latter cases (as well as in Serbo-Croatian), strictness of weight-mapping is modulated gradiently by stress level.

Singapore English consonant clusters undergo phonological processes that exhibit variation and opacity. Quantitative evidence shows that these patterns are genuine and systematic. Two main conclusions emerge. First, a small set of phonological constraints yields a typological structure (T-order) that captures the quantitative patterns, independently of specific assumptions about how the grammar represents variation. Second, the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that phonological opacity has only one source: the interleaving of phonology and morphology.

The advent of Optimality Theory has revived the interest in articulatorily and perceptually driven markedness in phonological research. To some researchers, the cross-linguistic prevalence of such markedness relations is indication that synchronic phonological grammar should include phonetic details. However, there are at least two distinct ways in which phonetics can be incorporated in an optimality-theoretic grammar: traditional constraint domination and Flemming (2001) 's proposal that the costs of constraint violations should be weighted and summed. I argue that constraint weighting is unnecessary as an innovation in Optimality Theory. The arguments are twofold. First, using constraint families with intrinsic rankings, constraint domination formally predicts the same range of phonological realisations as constraint weighting. Second, with proper constraint definitions and rankings, both the additive effect and the locus effect predicted by constraint weighting can be replicated in constraint domination.

While many phonological patterns target classes of sounds that can be defined phonetically, a large number of patterns in descriptive grammars involve sounds that cannot be easily characterised in phonetic terms. This finding suggests that phonological patterns themselves must be taken into account when learning phonological representations, and that phonological classes may emerge in learning from both phonetic factors (bottom-up) and phonological patterns (top-down). The current work presents a case of a phonetically unnatural class in South Bolivian Quechua that is active in the phonology of the language, and provides experimental support that this class is referred to by speakers’ grammars. While many cases of phonetically unnatural classes have been documented in descriptions of language patterns, in most cases there is little or no evidence that these patterns or classes are represented by speakers as they are described by linguists.