Volume 27, Fall 2011

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Browsing Volume 27, Fall 2011 by Subject "Phonology"

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    On the boundaries of Irish prosodic words
    (University of Calgary, 2011-09) Windsor, Joseph W
    This study uses the facts of Irish lenition, gemination processes and stress placement constraints to refute the theory of the syntax-phonology interface proposed by Truckenbrodt (1999) where it is claimed that the only structure visible to phonology at the interface is that of phrases. I use these same facts in support of Match Theory (Selkirk 2009; to appear) which allows a direct 1:1 mapping between syntactic and phonological structure at the word, phrase and clausal levels. Further, I go on to propose strength conditions on the boundaries of prosodic words dependant on whether those words are maximal, or non-maximal recursive word structures. I conclude that while *STRUC constraints eliminate redundant word bracketing structure, it does not target recursive word bracketing provided that that bracket contain at least some segmental information. This fact will account for Geminate Inalterability (Ní Chosáin 1991; Green 2008) found in Irish coronal clusters as well as secondary stress placement present only in recursive word structure. These facts can only be handled by a theory that allows a direct mapping of all types of syntactic structures to prosodic structure and not just syntactic phrases to phonological phrases.
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    The opacity of s-irregular verbs in Korean: confronting Optimality Theory approaches
    (University of Calgary, 2011-09) Lee, Joan
    In Korean phonology, the vowel ɨ deletes when it appears in a vowel hiatus context across the boundary between a root word and a suffix (e.g. [pe:na] (/pe:-ɨna/) 'since (it) goes'). The class of “s-irregular verbs”, however, exhibits opacity in that ɨ fails to delete in some surface forms although the conditioning environment appears to be present. Instead, these verbs undergo a process of vowel shortening (e.g. [kɨəsə] (/kɨ:s-əsə/) 'marks and'), despite the fact that long vowels are allowed in other forms as shown above. This paper treats the underapplication of ɨ-deletion and the overapplication of vowel shortening as potentially two instances of opacity exhibited by the same class of verbs in Korean. Standard Optimality Theory (OT) cannot model problems of opacity, but other OT approaches for dealing with opaque processes have been proposed. I show that Comparative Markedness (McCarthy 2003) is a more suitable OT approach in accounting for the opacity of these s-irregular verbs compared to Sympathy Theory (McCarthy 1999) and Contrast Preservation Theory (Lubowicz 2003), although not without new implications.