Armin Mester

Sympathy theory and German truncations

1. Sympathy defined McCarthy 1997 makes the important proposal that phonological opacity arises through constraints on a new type of correspondence relation holding within the candidate set that Gen(erator) produces for a given input, i.e., a relation between cocandidates. The main idea is that a candidate may win because it is in sympathy with a particular failed co-candidate—a candidate that is optimal with respect to a specific lower-ranking constraint. McCarthy 1997 illustrates his proposal with an example from Biblical Hebrew: the opaque interaction of epenthesis and -deletion in forms like /des / dese ‘grass’. The epenthetic final e is obligatory ( dese, *des) and explicable as resolving a final s -cluster—the trouble being, however, that the triggering epenthesis is absent from the output form ( dese, *dese ) for independent reasons (it is not a possible coda). In serialist terms, the virtual form dese , which is neither an input nor an output but instrumental in the explication of epenthesis, is conceptualized as an intermediate stage of the derivation:

Segmental Phonology in Optimality Theory: Structure Preservation and Stratal Opacity in German

version of this paper. For useful comments, we are indebted to the members of the Special Research Project for the Typological Investigation of Languages and Cultures of the East and the W est at Tsukuba University (7/99), to the audience at the PAIK meeting at Kobe University (12/99), and to the participants at the Workshop o n Conflicting Rule s in Phonology and Syntax at the U nivers ity of Pots dam (1 2/99). Speci al than ks are d ue to Lu igi Burz io, Caroline Fe ry, Haruka Fuka zawa, Shosuke Haraguchi, B ruce Hayes, T akeru Honma , Rene Kager , Mafuyu Kitaha ra, Haruo Ku bozono, Gereon M uller, Akio Nasu, S am Rosenthall, P hilip Spaelti, Shin-ichi T anaka, Mar kus Walter, Richa rd Wiese, Noriko Yamane, Teruo Yokotani, Yuko Yoshida, Hideki Zamma, and Draga Zec.

Morphological contrast and merger: ranuki in Japanese ∗

The central notion of structural linguistics is that of contrast or opposition: The linguistic value and role of a unit cannot be reduced to its physical substance, but is crucially determined by the network of relations that it enters into with other units of a similar kind: phoneme to phoneme, morpheme to morpheme, etc. A mid front vowel /e/ in a five-vowel system is something quite different from an /e/ in a seven-vowel system, perfect tense in a system without imperfect is something different from perfect tense in a system with imperfect, etc. Structuralist phonemics is the embodiment of a theory built on contrast as a central notion.

Directional Syllabification in Generalized Alignment

(Fall 1993). We gratefully acknowledge significant help from discussions and correspondence with Junko Ito, Ellen Broselow, John McCarthy, Alan Prince,Cheryl Zoll, and PASC editors Jason Merchant and Rachel Walker. It was Zolls work on Yawelmani Yokuts (Zoll 1993) that first inspired us to confront the issues dealt with in this note. As usual, all remaining shortcomings are our responsibility alone.

Unaccentedness in Japanese

A characteristic, though not necessary, property of so-called pitch accent languages is the existence of unaccented words. Work on unaccentedness in Japanese has found a concentration of such words in very specific areas of the lexicon, defined in prosodic terms. While unaccentedness might be some kind of default, the prosodic rationale for the way it is distributed over the lexicon is far from clear. This article investigates the underlying structural reasons for the distribution and develops a formal Optimality Theory account, which involves two well-known constraints: RIGHTMOST and NONFINALITY. The tension between the two, usually resolved by ranking (NONFINALITY ≫ RIGHTMOST ), finds another surprising resolution in unaccentedness: no accent, no conflict. Besides providing a more detailed analysis of Japanese word accent, which takes into consideration other mitigating phonological and morphological factors, the article aims to gain an understanding of the similarities and differences between pitch accent and stress accent languages.