ZASPiL 19 = Investigations in prosodic phonology : The role of the foot and the phonological word
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In this paper, I discuss four different verb forms in Ndebele (a Nguni Bantu language spoken mainly in Zimbabwe) - the imperative, reduplicated, future and participial. I show that while all four are subject to minimality restrictions, minimality is satisfied differently in each of these morphological contexts. To account for this, I argue that in Ndebele (as in other Bantu languages) Word and RED are not the only constituents which must satisfy minimality: the Stem is also subject to minimality conditions in some morphological contexts. This paper, then, provides additional arguments for the proposal that Phonological Word is not the only sub-lexical morpho-prosodic constituent. Further, I argue that, although Word, RED and Stern are all subject to the same minimality constraint – they must all be minimally bisyllabic - this does not follow from a single 'generalized' constraint. Instead, I argue, contra recent work within Generalized Template Theory (see, e.g., McCarthy & Prince 1994, 1995a, 1999; Urbanezyk 1995, 1996; and Walker 2000; etc.) that a distinct minimality constraint must be formalized for each of these morpho-prosodic constituents.
The distribution of trimoraic syllables in German and English as evidence for the phonological word
(2000)
In the present article I discuss the distribution of trimoraic syllables in German and English. The reason I have chosen to analyze these two languages together is that the data in both languages are strikingly similar. However, although the basic generalization in (1) holds for both German and English, we will see below that trimoraic syllabIes do not have an identical distribution in both languages.
In the present study I make the following theoretical claims. First, I argue that the three environments in (1) have a property in common: they all describe the right edge of a phonological word (or prosodic word; henceforth pword). From a formal point of view, I argue that a constraint I dub the THIRD MORA RESTRICTION (henceforth TMR), which ensures that trimoraic syllables surface at the end of a pword, is active in German and English. According to my proposal trimoraic syllables cannot occur morpheme-internally because monomorphemic grammatical words like garden are parsed as single pwords. Second, I argue that the TMR refers crucially to moraic structure. In particular, underlined strings like the ones in (1) will be shown to be trimoraic; neither skeletal positions nor the subsyllabic constituent rhyme are necessary. Third, the TMR will be shown to be violated in certain (predictable) pword-internal cases, as in Monde and chamber; I account for such facts in an OptimalityTheoretic analysis (henceforth OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993) by ranking various markedness constraints among themselves or by ranking them ahead of the TMR. Fourth, I hold that the TMR describes a concrete level of grammar, which I refer to below as the 'surface' representation. In this respect, my treatment differs significantly from the one proposed for English by Borowsky (1986, 1989), in which the English facts are captured in a Lexical Phonology model by ordering the relevant constraint at level 1 in the lexicon.
Identity effects in phonology are deviations from regular phonological form (i.e. canonical patterns) which are due to the relatedness between words. More specifically, identity effects are those deviations which have the function to enhance similarity in the surface phonological form of morphologically related words. In rule-based generative phonology the effects in question are described by means of the cycle. For example, the stress on the second syllable in cond[ɛ]nsation as opposed to the stresslessness of the second syllable in comp[ǝ]nsation is described by applying the stress rules initially to the sterns thereby yielding condénse and cómpensàte. Subsequently the stress rules are reapplied to the affixed words with the initial stress assignment (i.e. stress on the second syllable in condense, but not in compensate) leaving its mark in the output form (cf. Chomsky and Halle 1968). A second example are words like lie[p]los 'unloving' in German, which shows the effects of neutralization in coda position (i.e. only voiceless obstruents may occur in coda position) even though the obstruent should 'regularly' be syllabified in head position (i.e. bl is a wellformed syllable head in German). Here the stern is syllabified on an initial cycle, obstruent devoicing applies (i.e. lie[p]) and this structure is left intact when affixation applies (i.e. lie[p ]Ios ) (cf. Hall 1992). As a result the stern of lie[p]los is identical to the base lie[p].
The aim of this paper is to show what role prosodic constituents, especially the foot and the prosodic word play in Polish phonology. The focus is placed on their function in the representation of extrasyllabic consonants in word-initial, word-medial, and word-final positions.
The paper is organized as follows. In the first section, I show that the foot and the prosodic word are well-motivated prosodic constituents in Polish prosody. In the second part, I discuss consonant clusters in Polish focussing on segments that are not parsed into a syllable due to violations of the Sonority Sequencing Generalisation, i.e. extrasyllabic segments. Finally, I analyze possible representations of the extrasyllabic consonants and conclude that both the foot and the prosodic word play a crucial role in terms of licensing. My proposal differs from the ones by Rubach and Booij (1990b) and Rubach (1997) in that I argue that the word-initial sonorants traditionally called extrasyllabic are licenced by the foot and not by the prosodic word (cf. Rubach and Booij (1990b)) or the syllable (cf. Rubach (1997)). For my analysis I adopt the framework of Optimality Theory, cf. McCarthy and Prince (1993), Prince and Smolensky (1993), in which derivational levels are abandoned and only surface representations are evaluated by means of universal constraints.
In this work, I examine a set of languages which appear to require resyllabification postlexically; in less derivational terms, a word's syllabification in isolation differs from its syllabification in a phrase-internal context. Although many people, myself included, have been looking at such cases in isolation over the years, I bring together several examples here to see what features they share and how an Optimality Theory analysis improves upon rule-based derivational approaches.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a unified (i.e. independent of lexical categories) account of Persian stress. I show that by differentiating word- and phrase-level stress rules, one can account for the superficial differences exemplified in (1) above and many of the stipulations suggested by previous scholars. The paper is organized as follows. In section 1, I look at nouns and adjectives and propose a rule that would account for their stress pattern. In section 2, I extend the stress rule to verbs and show the problem this category poses to our generalization. The main proposal of this paper is discussed in section 3. I introduce the phrasal stress rule in Persian and show that by differentiating word-level and phrase-level stress rules, one can come to a unified account of Persian stress. Section 4 deals with some problematic eases for the proposed generalization and discusses some tentative solutions and their theoretical consequences. Section 5 concludes the paper.
I argue in this study that consonantal strength shifts can be explained through positional bans on features, expressed over positions marked as weak at a given level of prosodic structure, usually the metrical foo!. This approach might be characterized as "templatic" in the sense it seeks to explain positional restrictions and distributional patterns relative to independently motivated, fixed prosodic elements. In this sense, it follows Dresher & Lahiri's (1991) idea of metrical coherence in phonological systems, namely, "[T]hat grammars adhere to syllabic templates and metrical patterns of limited types, and that these patterns persist across derivations and are available to a number of different processes ... " (251). [...] The study is structured as follows: section 1 presents a typology of distributional asymmetries based on data from unrelated languages, demonstrating that the stress foot of each of these languages determines the contexts of neutralization and weakening of stops. Section 2 elaborates the notion of a template, exploring some of its formal properties, while section 3 presents templatic analyses of data from English and German. Section 4 explores the properties of weak positions, especially weak onsets, in more detail, including discussion of templates in phonological acquisition. Section 5 summarizes and concludes the study.
