San Diego Linguistic Papers

Affix vowels often alternate to agree with stem vowels in a pattern dubbed root-outward harmony. I propose that root-outward harmony is subject to a condition that a stem not be phonologically altered under affixation. This analysis accounts most parsimoniously for the core empirical generalization of root-outward harmony: that stem vowels never alter-nate to agree with affix vowels even if the only alternative is for stem and affix to dis-agree. Analyses in terms of underspecification and/or directionality capture this generali-zation less readily. I formalize the proposed analysis in terms of stem-affixed form faith-fulness in Optimality Theory and compare it with likely alternatives.

This paper offers a detailed analysis of reduplicative patterns in Kirundi. In it, I show that what looks like simple OCP effects preventing the reduplicant and the base from being identical are due to the interaction of markedness and faithfulness constraints giving rise to what McCarthy and Prince (1994) call the emergence of the unmarked (TETU). Moreover, in accounting for the non-identity of the base and reduplicant, I show that a ranking paradox occurs when applying McCarthy and Prince’s (1995) Full Model of reduplication to Kirundi reduplicated words. I show that models with a broad Input-Output correspondence, like those advocated by Spaelti (1997) and Struijke (1998), easily account for Kirundi reduplicated words.

Ethiopian Semitic languages all have some form of internal reduplication. The characteristics of Tigre reduplication are described here, and are shown to diverge from the other languages in two main respects: i) the meaning and ii) the ability to incur multiple reduplication of the reduplicative syllable. The formation of internal reduplication is accomplished via infixation plus addditional templatic shape requirements which override many properties of the regular verb stem. Further constraints on realization of the full reduplicative syllable outweigh restrictions on multiple repetition of consonants, particularly gutturals.

The first part of the paper contrasts two different systems for representing the stress or accentuation of English words—that exemplified by Chomsky and Halle (1968) and that found in many English-language dictionaries. The main difference lies in the treatment of "full" (as opposed to "reduced") vowels: For Chomsky-Halle full vowels are always stressed; for the lexicographers they can be either accented or unaccented. Whereas the Chomsky-Halle notation concentrates on degrees of prominence among syllables, the dictionary representation corresponds to a surface representation of underlying metrical foot structure. We claim that the latter notation provides a simpler and more elegant characterization of English word accentuation. Adopting this perspective we show that English words typically are composed of binary and ternary feet that are left-headed, whereas unary feet and unfooted syllables are restricted to the right and left edges of words, respectively.

The main body of the paper provides an extensive analysis of English word accentuation. First, we consider morphologically simple (underived) words, and we present the rules for creating their foot structures and associated accents. Then we turn to morphologically complex (derived) forms.We adopt a noncyclic approach where the rules for deriving foot structures apply simultaneously to each of the constituents of a derived word. We discuss accent preservation, where the syllable that is accented in a contained word retains that accent in the derived word. Nonpreservation happens whenever there is overlap of syllables in the feet of two adjacent constituents. Next, we offer a nonderivational (OT-style) account of the data, and we compare the ranked constraints to the derivational rules for deriving foot structures. In support of the noncyclic approach, we show how the constraints evaluate simultaneously the morphological constituents of a derived form.

The final part of paper presents a set of correspondence rules for converting an accentual representation to a notation with stress levels. In this way we are able to extend the analysis to phrases, compounds, and sentences and to show that similar principles govern the stress levels of these higher-level constituent types. We reject the depth-of-embedding typical of many previous analyses, and instead we argue for a flat phonological phrase, one composed of unary, binary, or ternary constituents.