Nuclear stress and the life cycle of operators
Norvin Richards
January 2017
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003286
I offer a new argument in this paper for the proposal that empty categories left by extraction of DP may be of different kinds, depending on the nature of the extraction (Perlmutter 1972, Cinque 1990, Postal 1994, 1998, 2001, O’Brien 2015, Stanton 2016, and much other work). The argument is based on Postal’s (1994, 1998, 2001) discussion of the interaction of extraction with antipronominal contexts, together with Bresnan’s (1971) observations about the effects of extraction on the position of nuclear stress.

Testing OCP-labial effect on Japanese rendaku
Gakuji Kumagai
January 2017
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003290
In Japanese rendaku, there are a number of factors that inhibit rendaku. One of them is that, although /h/ usually becomes labial /b/ when rendaku applies (e.g., hako ‘box’ + hune ‘ship’ ? hakobune ‘ark’), the rendaku application of /h/ is blocked if the following consonant is labial /m/ (e.g., suna ‘sand’ + hama ‘beach’ ? sunahama ‘sand beach’/*sunabama) (Kawahara et al. 2006). One contributing factor to this rendaku blocking is that, if /h/ became labial /b/, it would beget a sequence of homorganic consonants /b…m…/, which would violate the OCP-labial effect. The current paper is the first report of an experiment that examined whether this restriction applies productively to nonce words that contain labial consonants. The results show that 1) the OCP-labial effect can be generalized in rendaku; 2) it works locally rather than non-locally; and 3) the applicability of rendaku is gradient according to the following labial consonant: The more similar two consonants are, the more strongly they are disfavored. To account for this gradient effect, I argue that the process involves two OCP-labial constraints: OCP (labial) and OCP (labial, -continuant).

The head in poetic metrics
Marc Van Oostendorp
January 2017
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003287
Terms such as ‘foot’, ‘iamb’ and ‘trochee’ have been adapted from poetic metrics to phonological analysis and further extended. Within formal (generative) analyses of poetry it is usually assumed that this means that there is some matching between poetic feet and phonological feet, but that these two have the same formal structure. This paper argues that this assumption is mistaken. Poetic feet are constituents, and they can be aligned to stress positions, but they have no heads. It is claimed that the reason for this is that poetic feet from a phonological point of view behave more like morphosyntactic constituents, such as words, than as phonological feet.

Contiguity Theory and pied-piping
Norvin Richards
January 2017
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003288
In this paper I apply the conditions of Contiguity Theory (Richards 2016) to the problem of pied piping. I derive the conditions on pied piping discovered by Cable (2007, 2010a, 2010b), and account for the connection discovered by Uribe-Etxebarria (2002) between the conditions on wh-in-situ in a given language and the conditions on pied-piping in that language. In the end, as in Cable’s approach, pied-piping dissolves as a phenomenon; the same conditions that determine when overt movement must take place also determine how much material may be pied-piped.

Deriving Contiguity
Norvin Richards
January 2017
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003289
In Richards (2016), I develop a theory of the cross-linguistic distribution of overt movement, which depends partly on a particular approach to the mapping of syntactic structure on prosodic structure. In this paper I explore the possibility that the special conditions on the prosody of structures containing Agree or selection relations that I posit in Richards (2016) can be eliminated; all that is necessary is a particular version of the general mapping of syntactic structures onto prosodic structures which is offered in Match Theory (Selkirk 2009, 2011, Elfner 2012, 2015, Clemens 2014, Bennett, Elfner, and McCloskey 2016), together with independently supported proposals about the syntactic representation of Agree relations. In the end, I claim, the distribution of overt movement may follow from the fact that the mapping of syntax onto prosody begins during the narrow-syntactic derivation, rather than after the derivation has concluded.

Idempotency in Optimality Theory
Giorgio Magri
January 2017
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003282
An idempotent phonological grammar maps phonotactically licit forms faithfully to themselves. This paper establishes tight sufficient conditions for idempotency in (classical) Optimality Theory. Building on Tesar (2013), these conditions are derived in two steps. First, idempotency is shown to follow from a general formal condition on the faithfulness constraints. Second, this condition is shown to hold for a variety of faithfulness constraints which naturally arise within McCarthy and Prince’s (1995) Correspondence Theory of faithfulness. This formal analysis provides an exhaustive toolkit for modeling chain shifts, which have proven recalcitrant to a constraint-based treatment.

Output-drivenness and partial phonological features
Giorgio Magri
January 2017
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003283
Tesar (2013) develops the notion of output-drivenness, provides guarantees that OT grammars satisfy it, and demonstrates its learnability implications. This squib discusses the extension of Tesar’s theory to a representational framework with partial phonological features. It considers a hierarchy of notions of output-drivenness of increasing strength which can be defined within this extended framework. It determines the strongest notion of output-drivenness which holds in the case of partial features. And it shows that the learnability implications discussed by Tesar carry over to a framework with partial features only if feature undefinedness is effectively treated by identity faithfulness constraints as an additional feature value.

Idempotency, output-drivenness and the faithfulness triangle inequality: some consequences of McCarthy’s (2003) categoricity generalization
Giorgio Magri
January 2017
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003284
Idempotency requires any phonotactically licit forms to be faithfully realized. Output-drivenness requires any discrepancies between underlying and output forms to be driven exclusively by phonotactics. Tesar (2013) and Magri (to appear) provide tight guarantees for OT output-drivenness and idempotency through conditions on the faithfulness constraints. This paper derives analogous faithfulness conditions for HG idempotency and output-drivenness and develops an intuitive interpretation of the various OT and HG faithfulness conditions thus obtained. The intuition is that faithfulness constraints measure the phonological distance between underlying and output forms. They should thus comply with a crucial axiom of the definition of distance, namely that any side of a triangle is shorter than the sum of the other two sides. This intuition leads to a faithfulness triangle inequality which is shown to be equivalent to the faithfulness conditions for idempotency and output-drivenness. These equivalences hold under various assumptions, crucially including McCarthy’s (2003b) generalization that (faithfulness) constraints are all categorical.

Morphologically assigned accent and an initial three syllable window in Ese’eja
Nicholas Rolle, Marine Vuillermet
January 2017
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003280
In this paper, we argue that Ese’eja demonstrates an initial three syllable window within which primary prominence must fall, a typologically rare metrical window (Caballero 2011). We illustrate how this window interacts in complex ways with morphologically-assigned accent, using a corpus of 2,000 elicited verb forms (Vuillermet 2012). We show that the surface position of accent depends on syllable count, root transitivity, and the type of inflectional affix present, classifying affixes into dominant, recessive, and rightmost-preserving sub-types. Further, we argue that tense/mood suffixes are associated with different cophonologies (Inkelas & Zoll 2007) depending on which stem syllable they assign accent to and whether they enforce iterative iambs or trochees. Finally, in Ese’eja when accent is assigned outside the window, the position of primary prominence falls on a position which is rhythmically dependent on the window-external accent, e.g. uniformly two syllables away, termed ‘Rhythmic Repair’. We contrast this novel type to ‘Default Repair’, where primary prominence is realized on a default position when accent appears outside of the metrical window (Kager 2012).

Vocalic alternations in Czech prefixes: evidence for prefix movement
Pavel Caha, Markéta Ziková
July 2016
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003276
This paper looks at a vowel zero alternation in Czech verbal prefixes (in comparison to Russian). We show that the data can only be explained if the prefix and the root form a constituent to the exclusion of all other verbal morphology, including the so-called theme marker: [[pref root] theme]. However, there are other phonological processes in Czech (infinitival lengthening), which suggest that the root and the theme marker form a constituent to the exclusion of the prefix: [pref [root theme]]. We argue that the apparent contradiction is resolved by prefix movement (Svenonius 2004). The prefix and the root are merged together, and there is a cycle of phonological computation that determines the vowel/zero status of the alternation site in the prefix. After the first cycle, the theme marker is added and the prefix moves higher up in the structure. This creates a remnant constituent containing just the root and the theme marker, and it is this remnant constituent that is subject to the infinitival lengthening.