The onset of the prosodic word (original) (raw)
Related papers
Phonology, 2013
The volume under review is a selection of papers offered in honour of Lisa Selkirk. All of the contributors are former students and/or colleagues of Lisa. The book contains 16 papers, divided into four sections: 1. 'Mora and syllable '; 2. ' Foot and prosodic word ' ; 3. ' Phrases and above'; 4. 'Prosodic hierarchy and semantic interpretation (focus) '. The selection of papers is quite balanced in terms of the distribution of topics, and reflects the large number of areas within phonology and at its interfaces where Lisa Selkirk has worked, and where her work has been deeply influential. Several major areas of phonology are covered, and both theoretical and experimental approaches are represented in the papers. The more formal approaches are all couched within Optimality Theory (OT). This is the framework Lisa Selkirk has been working in for the past two decades, and which she has certainly helped to develop and strengthen. Six of the papers are laboratory phonology oriented, also in line with Lisa's diversity of approaches to the study of prosody. The book will be of interest to language researchers, in particular to phonologists and linguists working on prosodic phonology, the morphology-phonology interface and the syntax-phonology interface, as well as on the importance of prosody to pragmatics and semantics. The first three papers are clearly OT-grounded. In the first, Karim Bensoukas & Abdelaziz Boudlal propose an account of the distribution of schwa in Moroccan Amazigh (also known as Berber) and Moroccan Arabic. In line with previous work, the authors claim that schwa is an epenthetic vowel, which is inserted for syllabification purposes to break up impermissible consonant clusters (a prosodic licensing analysis is proposed). Insertion depends on the interaction of a number of constraints related to syllable structure and weight. Facts are reported which provide convincing evidence for an analysis of closed syllables containing schwa as being light and monomoraic. We wonder if any interactions might be found between schwa insertion and suprasegmental/ phrasal phonology (as in languages such as European Portuguese ; Frota 2002), and how the phenomenon analysed relates to the well-known vowelless syllables that exist in at least some dialects of Berber (Ridouane 2008). Joe Pater's contribution challenges some fundamental assumptions of standard OT (Prince & Smolensky 1993). The author reanalyses syllabification data in another dialect of Berber (Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber; see e.g.
The role of prosody in morphologically governed phonotactic regularities
2002
My central concern in this paper is whether restrictions on segment sequencing necessarily mirror prosodically motivated segment distribution. The role of prosody in capturing the distributional regularities may well be less than straightforward in cases of abundant interactions with morphology. One such case, found in Serbian (Neo-štokavian dialect), is the focus of the present study. After addressing issues of syllabicity, I turn to syllable weight, focusing on presonorant lengthening: vowel lengthening in syllables closed with a sonorant, encountered only at certain morphological junctures. I present two analyses of presonorant lengthening. One provides prosodic motivation for this process but depends on a baroque set of opaque constraint interactions. The other interprets presonorant lengthening as a static phonotactic regularity, and includes only transparent constraint interactions. The former analysis has a considerable advantage over its alternative because of its straightfo...
Prosodic Constraints in Morphosyntactic Domains
Clitics are a famous topic challenging the modularity in grammatical organisation inasmuch as they cannot be adequately interpreted as exclusively belonging to one particular level of linguistic description. Various phenomena related to cliticisation, which are observable across languages, suggest that any description of clitic placement should take into consideration the interaction between (prosodic) phonology and (morpho)syntax.
Prosodic morphology I: Constraint interaction and satisfaction
1993
Prosodic Morphology (McCarthy and Prince 1986 et seq.) is a theory of how morphological and phonological determinants of linguistic form interact with one another in a grammatical system. More specifically, it is a theory of how prosodic structure impinges on templatic and circumscriptional morphology, such as reduplication and infixation. There are three essential claims:
Morphological complexity and prosodic minimality
It is widely attested, cross-linguistically, for both words and prosodic morphemes to be required to be minimally bimoraic or disyllabic. Work since McCarthy and Prince (1986) argues that these minimality effects fall out from the Prosodic Hierarchy. Requiring the relevant morpheme to be a Prosodic Word and dominate a stress Foot automatically also imposes a two mora or two syllable minimality requirement. In this paper I show, based on a reanalysis of reduplication in Axininca Campa, that this Prosodic Hierarchy-based theory of minimality is inadequate. I argue instead that morphological minimality conditions are better explained as a form of Head-Dependent Asymmetry (Dresher and van der Hulst 1998). Head morphemes are enhanced by requiring more complex prosodic structure, mirroring their more complex morphological structure. This alternative approach not only provides a uniform account of minimality effects holding for Axininca Campa reduplication, it also solves the problems raised by McCarthy and Prince's (1993, 1995) analysis of the data.
The role of the prosodic word in phonotactic generalizations
1999
In traditional generative phonology, phonotactic generalisations were expressed by conditions on underlying forms of morphemes (morpheme structure conditions), in combination with the set of phonological rules (cf. Postal 1968). It is the claim of this paper to show that the phonotactics of morphemes should be accounted for primarily in terms of properties of prosodie constituents such as the syllable, the foot, and the prosodie word, three uncontroversial categories of the prosodie hierarchy. I will focus on the role of the prosodie word because the phonotactic role of that prosodie constituent has been somewhat neglected compared to that of, in particular, the syllable. A second claim, intimately connected to the previous one, is that the relevant constraints pertain to the surface level, i.e. they are output constraints. In other words, they do not function as constraints on underlying forms.
Morphologically Governed Accent in Optimality Theory
2013
We stand around the burning oil drum and we warm ourselves, our hands and faces, in its pure lapping heat. We raise steaming cups of coffee to our lips and we drink it with both hands. But we are salmon fisherman. And now we stamp our feet on the snow and rocks and move upstream, slowly, full of love, toward the still pools. -Raymond Carver, Fires Rothstein, for their guidance and support throughout the endeavor. I am also grateful to Alan Prince, who, while not a formal member of the committee, went beyond his role as a consultant and provided many important comments on all aspects of this thesis. I found it tremendously encouraging to sit across from these linguists and find that they had put aside the time to read and respond cogently to the bulky materials stuffed in their boxes. Thank you for allowing me the space to develop my ideas, slowing me down when I was rushing, and sweating the details when I no longer could. I would also like to express my gratitude to all those who have contributed over the years to my professional and intellectual development. There is a long road between putting together a good homework solution and writing a dissertation, and the support I received from my committee and the larger faculty at UMass was essential to my arriving at where I am today. Many others aside from the committee have helped me come to understand myself as a linguist, but those at the forefront of my mind include Emmon Bach, Roger Higgins, Angelika Kratzer, and Ellen Woolford, and also my teachers and advisors at UC Santa Cruz, Junko Itô, Sandra Chung, and Bill Ladusaw. The idea that served as the point of departure for this thesis, namely that the accentual properties of roots play a major role in governing word accent, was first hit upon in the summer of 1995 in the weekly brown bag meetings of John McCarthy's NSF grant. I am grateful to John for providing that environment, and for the creative input and expert advice of the participants of those meetings, including
Linguistica, 2005
It is a well-known fact that in English, syllabification of derived words differs according to the attaching affix, Chomsky and Halle (1968). In words such as hinder, meter, burgle the final sonorant of the roots /hindr/, /mitr/, /burgl/ is syllabic in word final position, following the rule of schwa insertion that makes a final sonorant preceded by a consonant syllabic. However, in related forms where these roots are followed by a vowel-initial affix, such as hindrance, metric, burglar, the sonorants in question are not syllabic, butare syllabified as onsets of the following syllable. Not all affixes beginning in a vowel have the same effect on syllabification. The participle forming affixing triggers the schwa-insertion regardless of its vowel-initial status, e.g. (hinder /hindgr/: hindrance /hindrans/, but hindering /hindgril]/, */hindril]/). Chomsky and Halle (1968) treat this property as inherent to the attaching affix; i.e.-ance in hindrance differs from-ing in hindering with respect to the triggering of the schwa-insertion rule. Using a finer-grained syntax of words, this paper derives the differences in pronunciation of the above mentioned words as following not exclusively from a diacritic on the affix, as in Chomsky and Halle (1968), but rather from the attachment position of the affix in the syntactic structure of the word.