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 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.

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.