We argue that the common phonological assumptions that (i) plain voiceless consonants are less marked than voiceless aspirates and (ii) the unmarked two-way stop system opposes unaspirated voiced and voiceless members are incorrect. A wide range of phonetic and internal and external phonological evidence suggests instead that (i) the maximally unmarked single-series stop is unspecified for laryngeal features and (ii) the unmarked two-way stop system opposes aspirated and unaspirated stops, and the aspirated series may be the unmarked member of this set.

This paper presents a previously unnoticed universal property of stress patterns in the world's languages: they are, for small neighbourhoods, neighbourhood-distinct. Neighbourhood-distinctness is a locality condition defined in automata-theoretic terms. This universal is established by examining stress patterns contained in two typological studies. Strikingly, many logically possible – but unattested – patterns do not have this property. Not only does neighbourhood-distinctness unite the attested patterns in a non-trivial way, it also naturally provides an inductive principle allowing learners to generalise from limited data. A learning algorithm is presented which generalises by failing to distinguish same-neighbourhood environments perceived in the learner's linguistic input – hence learning neighbourhood-distinct patterns – as well as almost every stress pattern in the typology. In this way, this work lends support to the idea that properties of the learner can explain certain properties of the attested typology, an idea not straightforwardly available in optimality-theoretic and Principle and Parameter frameworks.

Developments in phonological theory have led to the recognition that phonological representations have a layered constituent structure. Many, perhaps all, of these constituents contain elements which can be identified as heads. Heads enter into various kinds of relations with their dependents. In this article, we identify a phenomenon which is quite pervasive in every part of phonology which has heads and dependents, namely, the existence of head–dependent asymmetries (henceforth HDAs). While various particular manifestations of these asymmetries are well known and have been much studied, this is the first attempt, to our knowledge, to unite a broad range of seemingly different phenomena under one heading. We identify various types of HDAs, and propose constraints on possible HDAs.

Most importantly, we distinguish between HDAs that involve complexity, and those that involve visibility. These have properties which potentially contradict each other. We propose that they apply in fundamentally different types of cases: unlike complexity HDAs, visibility HDAs are limited to mappings from one phonological plane to another, and so are related to the notion of projection (cf. Vergnaud 1977).

We also wish to show that an understanding of HDAs reveals general structural principles that play a role in diverse phenomena at various levels of the phonological hierarchy. For example, the fact noted in the Optimality Theory literature that certain positions tend to be more ‘faithful’ to underlying specifications (Beckman 1998) is a consequence of the fact that heads allow more complexity. These principles act as constraints on possible constraints, and on possible mappings from one plane to another.

Varieties of Malay, including Indonesian, have been variously described as having word stress on the penultimate syllable, as having variable word stress and as having a phrase-final pitch accent without word stress. In Ambonese Malay, the alignment of sentence-final pitch peaks fails to support the existence of either word stress or phrase-final pitch accents. Also, the shape of its pitch peaks fails to vary systematically with the information status of the phrase-final word. The two intonation melodies of the language include phrase-final boundary-tone complexes which do not associate with any syllables. The declarative rise-fall would appear to be timed so as to occur within the last word of the sentence. Minimal stress pairs presented in earlier descriptions show a contrast between /a/ and a segmentally distinct weak /ă/, a contrast that also appears in positions that have not been claimed to have stress. A preliminary phonological analysis concludes the account.

The discussion of vowel harmony in this paper continues the theoretical discussion that was sparked by Clements' first proposals concerning an autosegmental treatment of vowel harmony in general (1980 [1976]). I will attempt to show that problems that arose in early autosegmental treatments of certain types of vowel harmony can be elegantly overcome and that autosegmental theory more generally provides an attractive framework for the treatment of vowel systems and vowel harmony. I will discuss three distinct types of systems here: the slightly asymmetrical system of Khalkha Mongolian, the canonical five-vowel system as it can be seen in Bantu (Yaka, in this case), and the well-known Finnish/Hungarian type of system. The kinds of advances made here answer, I believe, the critical comments made in Anderson (1980), in which significant sceptical questions are raised concerning whether the successes of autosegmental accounts of West African systems can be extended to other types of vowel harmony systems.

Generalised Template Theory holds that templatic restrictions on reduplicative morphemes follow from independent, general principles. Under lexically indexed constraint theory, however, reduplicants are in no way special – morpheme-specific constraints may apply just to reduplicants. This article presents reduplication patterns in Tonkawa, which are argued to require reduplicant-specific constraints. In Tonkawa, the reduplicant is limited in size to CV, and is usually syllabified as a light syllable. Even though the language typically prefers heavy syllables word-initially, they are light if the syllable is a reduplicative prefix. This size restriction is backcopied onto the first syllable of the base. In the context of the prosodic phonology of Tonkawa, this pattern can only be understood if there is a reduplicant-specific prohibition against heavy syllables. This prohibition is formulated in terms of lexically indexed constraints on the reduplicant, which allows for a nuanced understanding of the emergent CV template.

This study examines how phonetic details produced by non-bilingual borrowers (‘disseminators’) are categorised when new words are transmitted to the monolinguals of the borrowing language community (‘recipients’). The stimuli are based on research showing that the schwa inserted by English speakers into non-native clusters (e.g. /zgɑmo/→[zəgɑmo]) differs acoustically from lexical schwa (e.g. [zəgɑmo]). In Experiment 1, listeners transcribed Cluster (CC), Lexical (CəC) and Transitional (CəC) stimuli produced by an English speaker. Transcriptions of CəC stimuli were split between CC and CVC, and participants wrote CəC with a vowel less often than they did CəC. Experiment 2 demonstrated that listeners had difficulty discriminating between CəC and both CC and CəC. These findings suggest that CəC is acoustically intermediate between clusters and schwas; thus recipients may assign CəC token to either of the phonotactic categories CC or CəC. The ramifications of these findings for loanwords and the acquisition of phonological contrast are discussed.

Natural Phonology (henceforth NP), founded by Stampe (1969, cf. 1980), and not to be confused with Natural Generative Phonology (henceforth NGP, as in Vennemann 1972 and Hooper 1976) and other ‘natural’ and ‘concrete’ trends in process phonologies (as in Bruck et al. 1974, cf. §3·3), has been well expounded in Donegan & Stampe (1979b) and, in terms of its application to language acquisition, in Edwards & Shriberg (1983). Important differences from Generative Phonology (henceforth GP) have been enumerated by Wojcik (1981). It is not my intention to repeat these expositions, but rather to answer those criticisms that have so far been answered only partially, such as the objections to NP discussed in Anderson (1981), Dinnsen (1978), Dinnsen & Eckmann (1977, 1978), Drachman (1978, 1981), Dressler (1974a), Hellberg (1980), Kodzasov & Krivnova (1981: 145ff), Lass (1980, 1981).

This paper presents evidence that tongue-body position is always specified in the phonological representation of coronals, even where it is non-contrastive. Tongue-body position is needed to account for the typology of interactions between coronal consonants and adjacent vowels. For example, coronals only condition vowel fronting if they are produced with a front tongue body (usually anterior coronals), and only coronals produced with a back tongue body (usually retroflexes) condition vowel retraction. However, coronals do not have a fixed tongue-body position. Tongue-body position is affected by the position of the tongue tip/blade, because these articulators are physically connected, so each type of coronal has a preferred tongue-body position that facilitates the production of the coronal constriction. These preferences can be overridden, however, e.g. due to assimilation to a vowel. Optimality-theoretic feature co-occurrence constraints provide a good account of this type of dependency between articulators.

In this paper I consider the behaviour of word-internal empty nuclei preceded by a consonant cluster. I provide a principled account for the fact that in this context a properly governable empty nucleus receives a phonetic interpretation. To do so I introduce a new notion: GOVERNMENT-LICENSING. I argue that a non-nuclear head can govern a complement only if (i) it has the required charm value, or if charmless, the required complexity, and (ii) it is licensed to govern by a following nuclear head. Among other things government-licensing accounts for the phonetic realisation of an empty nucleus following a governing onset head (i.e. a non-nuclear skeletal point which governs a rhymal or an onset complement), and for the simplification of a consonant cluster preceding an unrealised empty nucleus. If, in order to govern a complement, a nonnuclear point must be government-licensed and if a properly governed empty nucleus may not be such a licenser, in a situation where a properly governable empty nucleus follows a consonant cluster we predict the two following possibilities: to license the consonant to govern, the empty nucleus will fail to be properly governed, or proper government will apply, preventing the non-nuclear head from governing its complement, which entails the loss of this head.

We report on an articulatory study which uses an electromagnetic articulograph to investigate word-initial consonant clusters in Italian. In particular, we investigate clusters involving a sibilant, such as in spina ‘thorn’. The status of the sibilant in such clusters, referred to as ‘impure s’, is an unresolved problem for the syllable phonology of Italian. Coordination patterns of the gestural targets of consonantal and vocalic gestures reveal a structural difference between obstruent–liquid clusters, e.g. /pr/, and sibilant–obstruent clusters, e.g. /sp/. Whereas in /pr/, both /p/ and /r/ have distinct coordination patterns as compared to either /p/ or /r/ as a single consonant in the same (word-initial) position, this is not the case for /sp/. Here the /p/ patterns like a single consonant: /p/ in spina patterns with /p/ in Pina (proper name). Thus, although /s/ in spina constitutes a word onset, there is evidence against it being part of a syllable onset.

I propose that there is a purely phonological drive to impose a reduplication-like structure (‘coupling’) on words. This structure can lead to enhancement or preservation of word-internal self-similarity. The case of vowel raising in Tagalog loan-stems is examined in detail. Raising can be blocked in order to preserve similarity between the stem penult and the stem ultima. The more similar the penult and ultima along various dimensions, the more likely coupling is, and thus the more likely resistance to raising. I attribute phonologically driven coupling to the activity of a constraint REDUP in generation, which shapes the way new words are lexicalised in the vowel-raising case, but also consider an alternative source for reduplicative construals (the effect of *SPEC in lexical learning). The proposal is compared to others that promote correspondence between similar or identical single segments within a word; I conclude that a relation between strings is necessary.

Function words in standard Serbian fall into two classes: prosodically free functional elements on the one hand, and prosodically bound functional elements, or clitics, on the other. The two classes have overlapping syntactic distributions, yet exhibit clear prosodic differences. Free functional elements may become prosodic words if they are minimally disyllabic, or if focused, and in this they crucially differ from clitics, whose only prosodic option is to be included into the host prosodic word. It is argued that the prosodic properties of the two classes of function words cannot be captured by a single set of ranked constraints, and that one of the classes, the class of clitics, needs to be encoded lexically, by virtue of prosodic prespecification.

The theory of PROSODIC CIRCUMSCRIPTION (McCarthy & Prince 1990a) is a general approach to the problem of limiting the domain of rules to less than a morphological constituent. For example, in the Arabic singular/ plural pairs ndub/anaadib ‘locust’ and sulṭaan/salaaṭiin ‘sultan’, vowel length in the final syllable remains unaltered despite significant changes in the shape of the rest of the word. Prosodic circumscription theory partitions the singular base into affected (aun, sul) and unaffected (dib, ṭaan) portions, with only the affected portion mapped onto a light–heavy (or iambic) template.

This paper reexamines the issue of the mora, the foot and the syllable in Tokyo Japanese, and shows that whereas the mora and the foot are indisputably present and active, the evidence for the syllable is inconspicuous and disputable. Building on this observation, I claim that Tokyo Japanese makes no use of the syllable. Instead, two types of mora are distinguished: regular CV moras and weak (deficient) moras. Weak moras include the moraic nasal, the first part of a geminate and the second part of a long vowel, as well as moras containing an onsetless vowel, a devoiced vowel or an epenthetic vowel. I further argue that feet obey a set of structural constraints stipulating that they be properly headed by a regular full mora. With this enriched notion of mora type, the paper argues that neither the syllable nor any other level of the prosodic hierarchy is obligatory in all languages.

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.

In a detailed comparison of the intonational systems of two unrelated languages, Israeli Sign Language and American Sign Language, we show certain similarities as well as differences in the distribution of several articulations of different parts of the face and motions of the head. Differences between the two languages are explained on the basis of pragmatic notions related to information structure, such as accessibility and contingency, providing novel evidence that the system is inherently intonational, and only indirectly related to syntax. The study also identifies specific ways in which the physical modality in which language is expressed influences intonational structure.

A major insight of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993) is that grammatical constraints are ranked and violable. These ranked constraints evaluate an infinite set of candidate output forms, of which the optimal one is the actual output. The winning candidate is a compromise between the potentially conflicting demands that grammatical constraints impose. A question that the OT literature has only rarely addressed is how ungrammaticality arises if constraints are violable and violation does not entail ungrammaticality.

In this paper, we point to some shortcomings of the only existing proposal to deal with ungrammaticality in OT, the special constraint MParse (Prince & Smolensky 1993). We propose a restructuring of the architecture of the OT constraint system that overcomes these shortcomings. We show that one of the great strengths of OT, that of separating well-formedness from the repair strategies to arrive at well-formed structures, is a weakness in dealing with absolute ungrammaticality. MParse forces us to consider what repairs might have been employed to fix up an ill-formed string. However, as we show in several cases, absolute ungrammaticality should be considered separately from the issue of possible repairs. Ungrammaticality results when the optimal form a grammar can produce still fails to satisfy a constraint governing ungrammaticality. MParse, as a component of Eval, requires us to evaluate multiple candidates, hence multiple repairs, simultaneously. We demonstrate that existence of a repair shown by particular alternations in a language (for example to avoid impermissible coda clusters) does not mean that the same repair will be available as a measure of last recourse to save an otherwise ungrammatical form (for example, to augment a subminimal form).

We propose to add a non-optimising constraint component called Control, which contains only those inviolable constraints that cause ungrammaticality rather than repair. If the winning candidate from Eval, the usual ranked and violable constraint component, satisfies all the constraints in Control, it is a grammatical output. If it violates a constraint in Control, no grammatical output is possible. This approach is empirically superior to MParse, and it also makes clearer a crucial distinction between two kinds of inviolable constraints that has not enjoyed much explicit attention in the literature. Inviolable constraints in Eval outrank all potentially conflicting constraints and cause repairs or block otherwise general alternations. Inviolable constraints in Control cause ungrammaticality, never repair.Two new developments in OT might possibly have a bearing on the success or failure of MParse. The first of these is McCarthy's (1998) Sympathy Theory. The second is Sprouse's (1997) Enriched Input Theory. Both of these models are in the early stages of development. There are no published references as yet for either. Furthermore, McCarthy (1999) is a revision of Sympathy Theory designed to reduce its currently excessive formal power. Since the proper form of these theories is as yet unclear, we refrain from discussing them here. To the best of our knowledge, however, our Control proposal is fully compatible with both.

A basic assumption in current phonology is that features are not an unstructured set like (1a), but are arranged hierarchically into a constituent structure tree such as (1b), proposed in Sagey (1986: 61):

Other groupings of features have been proposed (Clements 1985; Steriade 1987; inter alii).

A fundamental assumption of theories like (1b) is that rules operate on constituents, an assumption which is formalised by limiting rules to spreading or delinking a single node.

This paper argues that processes traditionally classified as lenition fall into at least two subsets, with distinct phonetic reflexes, formal properties and characteristic contexts. One type, referred to as loss lenition, frequently neutralises contrasts in positions where they are perceptually indistinct. The second type, referred to as continuity lenition, can target segments in perceptually robust positions, increases the intensity and/or decreases the duration of those segments, and very rarely results in positional neutralisation of contrasts. While loss lenition behaves much like other phonological processes, analysing continuity lenition is difficult or impossible in standard phonological approaches. The paper develops a phonetically based optimality-theoretic account that explains the typology of the two types of lenition. The crucial proposal is that, unlike loss lenition, continuity lenition is driven by constraints that reference multiple prosodic positions.