We analyse the distribution of vowel laxness and stress alternations in Slovenian nouns (for example in the nominative and genitive forms of the masculine noun [ˈjɛzik ~ jeˈzika] ‘tongue’), showing that stress shifts away from mid lax vowels in initial syllables. A stress shift of this sort is predicted by positional faithfulness (Beckman 1997). We show that this prediction is correct, contra McCarthy (2007, 2010) and Jesney (2011). The productivity of the pattern is confirmed in a large-scale nonce-word task. Stress shift in Slovenian is a result of the markedness of mid lax vowels and, perhaps counterintuitively, faithfulness to laxness in initial stressed position.

Work in Optimality Theory on the constraint set, Con, has often raised the question of whether certain types of constraints have multiple specific versions or are single general constraints that effectively sum the violations of specific variants. Comparing and evaluating analyses that differ in this way requires knowing the effect of this kind of summing on the full typology, which itself depends on the relationship of summands in the full system. Such relationships can be difficult to ascertain from inspecting violation profiles alone. This paper uses Property Theory to analyse the systematic effects of summing constraints in two distinct kinds of relationships: (i) across distinct properties, and (ii) within a constraint class in a single property. The results show how these two types collapse the typology in different, yet predictable, ways. Property Analysis provides a key to identifying constraint relationships and so to delineating the effect of summing.

An experiment showed that Japanese speakers’ judgement of Pokémons’ evolution status on the basis of nonce names is affected both by mora count and by the presence of a voiced obstruent. The effects of mora count are a case of counting cumulativity, and the interaction between the two factors a case of ganging-up cumulativity. Together, the patterns result in what Hayes (2020) calls ‘wug-shaped curves’, a quantitative signature predicted by MaxEnt. I show in this paper that the experimental results can indeed be successfully modelled with MaxEnt, and also that Stochastic Optimality Theory faces an interesting set of challenges. The study was inspired by a proposal made within formal phonology, and reveals important previously understudied aspects of sound symbolism. In addition, it demonstrates how cumulativity is manifested in linguistic patterns. The work here shows that formal phonology and research on sound symbolism can be mutually beneficial.

The feature-economy principle is one of the key theoretical notions which have been postulated to account for the structure of phoneme inventories in the world's languages. In this paper, we test the explanatory power of this principle by conducting a study of the co-occurrence of consonant segments in phonological inventories, based on a sample of 2761 languages. We show that the feature-economy principle is able to account for many important patterns in the structure of the world's phonological inventories; however, there are particular classes of sounds, such as what we term the ‘basic consonant inventory’ (the core cluster of segments found in the majority of the world's languages), as well as several more peripheral clusters whose organisation follows different principles.

Morphologically conditioned phonology, where a particular phonological alternation or requirement holds only for a subset of lexical items or in a subset of morphological contexts, is well documented. This paper expands on the literature by examining phonological alternations where two independent triggering morphemes must both be present for a phonological alternation to apply. Several cases of doubly morphologically conditioned phonological alternations, from a diverse set of languages, are described. The existence of morphologically conditioned phonology with two triggers informs our models of the interface between morphology and phonology, in that phonological operations must be able to reference the presence of more than one morpheme simultaneously. A range of possible analyses are considered, including those set in Stratal OT, Indexed Constraint Theory, Cophonology Theory and Cophonologies by Phase Theory. A Cophonologies by Phase account is found to be optimal, where multiple morpheme-specific phonological requirements accumulate and co-trigger alternations within a single spell-out domain.