Ternary rhythmic systems differ from binary systems in stressing every third syllable in a word, rather than every second. Consider the following examples from Cayuvava (Key 1961), where stress is on every third syllable counting from the end of the word:

(1) a. à.ri.hi.hí.be.e ‘I have already put the top on’

b. ma.rà.ha.ha.é.i.ki ‘their blankets’

c. i.ki.tà.pa.re.ré.pe.ha ‘the water is clean’

Ternary rhythm is well-established for only a small group of languages, including Chugach Alutiiq, Cayuvava and Estonian, and possibly Winnebago. Nevertheless the stress patterns of these languages are sufficiently complex to warrant an ongoing debate about the implications for metrical theory (see Prince 1980, Levin 1985, 1988, Halle & Vergnaud 1987, Halle 1990, Hammond 1990, Dresher & Lahiri 1991, Rice 1992, Hewitt 1992, Kager 1993, 1994, Halle & Idsardi 1995, Hayes 1995, Ishii 1996, Elenbaas 1999, among others).

The reason for a fresh look at ternarity is the rise of Optimality Theory (henceforth OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993, McCarthy & Prince 1993a), a theory abandoning most devices on which rule-based accounts of ternarity were based. It abandons serial derivations and together with it directional foot assignment, a core device in parametric theories of word stress, as well as special parsing modes for ternary rhythm (Weak Local Parsing; Hayes 1995). Derivational mechanisms and parameters are replaced by universal and violable constraints, stating well-formedness on output forms, and ranked in language-particular hierarchies.

The issue then arises whether OT is able to predict the ternary patterns in a descriptively adequate fashion. The first goal of this paper is to argue that adequate and insightful analyses are indeed possible in OT for two ternary stress languages: Cayuvava and Chugach Alutiiq. We argue that these analyses require no ternarity-inducing mechanisms, such as ternary feet or special parsing modes. Instead ternarity emerges by LICENSING, involving interactions of the anti-lapse constraint *LAPSE (banning long sequences of unstressed syllables; Selkirk 1984) with standard foot- alignment constraints (ALL-FT-X, ALIGN-Y; McCarthy & Prince 1993b). Our analysis incorporates Ishii's (1996) insight that ternarity is a kind of underparsing, which is licensed by an anti-lapse constraint, and induced by standard foot alignment.

The goal of this article is to contribute to our understanding of glides – their properties and distribution in underlying and surface representations, the range and the features of their various phonetic manifestations, and their role in the assignment of syllable structure and stress. Spanish provides a rich opportunity for carrying out this study because of the special properties of high vocoids in this language, which are systematically realised as glides in particular contexts: they can function as both onsets and rhymes; they can occur in prepeak, peak and postpeak position; up to four can occur in a row; and they take on a wide range of surface realisations.

In the pursuit of our goal, we confront a problem in Spanish phonology that has tantalised investigators for the better part of this century, and rightly continues to do so. The conundrum involves the two sets of phonetic segments we transcribe as [i j y [barred dotless j] ž jˇ] and [u w γw gw] (articulatory descriptions and feature characterisations are given below). Classical structuralist studies, and some current analyses as well, see the problem as the taxonomic exercise of assigning each of these segments to a particular ‘phoneme’ or ‘underlying segment’. Our study includes the notion of phonemic inventory, but considers it as only one of many intersecting issues involved in the attempt to elucidate aspects of the mental representations that native Spanish speakers employ in their phonological computations. We undertake to raise the level of discourse concerning the problem at hand not only by redefining it but also by enlarging the set of data and descriptive issues brought to bear on it and by situating the discussion in a rich theoretical context.

Vowel duration is not contrastive in standard and regional varieties of Italian. However, vowels in stressed open syllables are longer than unstressed vowels or vowels in closed syllables. The increased duration is not equal in all positions. Most notably, the increased duration of a stressed open penultimate syllable is much greater than the duration of a stressed open antepenultimate syllable or a stressed final syllable, which has no noticeable duration increase. Nonetheless, phonological analyses of Italian have characterised length by a single rule (see for example Vogel 1986, Nespor & Vogel 1986) that lengthens non-final main stress vowels regardless of position. Phonetic studies, particularly Farnetani & Kori (1983, 1990) and Marotta (1985), pay closer attention to the duration of stressed vowels in different positions. Although their explanations of stressed vowel duration differ, the common theme is that duration differences are due to shortening vowels as a consequence of word compression or position (antepenultimate or penultimate syllable) in the word.

While the phonetic approaches account for differences in duration due to shortening, the phonological approaches propose lengthening with no regard for actual duration differences. The phonetic and phonological approaches to stressed vowel duration in Italian appear to be diametrically opposed. This paper proposes that lengthening a stressed vowel is the correct characterisation of duration differences in Italian, but there is no single rule that lengthens stressed vowels.

A number of recent papers have demonstrated the advantages of using a phonological model incorporating the timing and magnitude of articulatory gestures to account for alternations involving segments such as the English nasals, liquids and glides (e.g. Krakow 1989, Browman & Goldstein 1992, 1995, Sproat & Fujimura 1993, Gick, in press). Some of these works (McMahon et al. 1994, McMahon & Foulkes 1995) have made specific reference to the well-known phenomenon of English intrusiver, shown in (1).

formula here

However, previous analyses have not linked the intrusive r explicitly to other similar processes, nor viewed all of these processes as the natural results of more general principles of phonological organisation. Thus, the intrusive r has remained, in the eyes of most linguists, an isolated quirk of English history, or, as one phonologist (McCarthy 1993: 191) has called it, ‘the phonologically unnatural phenomenon of r-epenthesis’.

The present paper introduces into the discussion of intrusive r a recently documented related phenomenon known as intrusivel (Gick 1991, 1997, in preparation, Miller 1993). It is argued that these new facts, in conjunction with current advances in the understanding of articulatory factors in syllable structure, support a view in which the intrusive r and l are synchronically underlyingly present.

A major insight of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993) is that grammatical constraints are ranked and violable. These ranked constraints evaluate an infinite set of candidate output forms, of which the optimal one is the actual output. The winning candidate is a compromise between the potentially conflicting demands that grammatical constraints impose. A question that the OT literature has only rarely addressed is how ungrammaticality arises if constraints are violable and violation does not entail ungrammaticality.

In this paper, we point to some shortcomings of the only existing proposal to deal with ungrammaticality in OT, the special constraint MParse (Prince & Smolensky 1993). We propose a restructuring of the architecture of the OT constraint system that overcomes these shortcomings. We show that one of the great strengths of OT, that of separating well-formedness from the repair strategies to arrive at well-formed structures, is a weakness in dealing with absolute ungrammaticality. MParse forces us to consider what repairs might have been employed to fix up an ill-formed string. However, as we show in several cases, absolute ungrammaticality should be considered separately from the issue of possible repairs. Ungrammaticality results when the optimal form a grammar can produce still fails to satisfy a constraint governing ungrammaticality. MParse, as a component of Eval, requires us to evaluate multiple candidates, hence multiple repairs, simultaneously. We demonstrate that existence of a repair shown by particular alternations in a language (for example to avoid impermissible coda clusters) does not mean that the same repair will be available as a measure of last recourse to save an otherwise ungrammatical form (for example, to augment a subminimal form).

We propose to add a non-optimising constraint component called Control, which contains only those inviolable constraints that cause ungrammaticality rather than repair. If the winning candidate from Eval, the usual ranked and violable constraint component, satisfies all the constraints in Control, it is a grammatical output. If it violates a constraint in Control, no grammatical output is possible. This approach is empirically superior to MParse, and it also makes clearer a crucial distinction between two kinds of inviolable constraints that has not enjoyed much explicit attention in the literature. Inviolable constraints in Eval outrank all potentially conflicting constraints and cause repairs or block otherwise general alternations. Inviolable constraints in Control cause ungrammaticality, never repair.Two new developments in OT might possibly have a bearing on the success or failure of MParse. The first of these is McCarthy's (1998) Sympathy Theory. The second is Sprouse's (1997) Enriched Input Theory. Both of these models are in the early stages of development. There are no published references as yet for either. Furthermore, McCarthy (1999) is a revision of Sympathy Theory designed to reduce its currently excessive formal power. Since the proper form of these theories is as yet unclear, we refrain from discussing them here. To the best of our knowledge, however, our Control proposal is fully compatible with both.

A central idea in rule-based phonology is the serial derivation (Chomsky & Halle 1968). In a serial derivation, an underlying form passes through a number of intermediate representations on its way to the surface:

[Scheme here]

Implementational details can differ: the order of rules might be stipulated or it might be derived from universal principles; the steps might be called ‘rules’, ‘cycles’ or ‘levels’; the steps might involve applying rules or enforcing constraints. But, details aside, the defining characteristic of a serial derivation, in the sense I will employ here, is the pre-eminence of the chronological metaphor: the underlying form is transformed into a succession of distinct, accessible intermediate representations on its way to the surface. I will call any theory with this property ‘serialism’.

This paper presents a declarative analysis of the phonology of English auxiliaries. The strong and weak forms of auxiliary verbs in English have generally been treated as either related derivationally (Zwicky 1970, Wood 1979, Selkirk 1984) or as lexically suppletive items (Kaisse 1985; this view is also implicit in traditional treatments of English phonetics, e.g. Jones 1960). The derivational treatment involves destructive processes, which Declarative Phonology eschews (Bird 1995, Coleman 1995). The treatment as separate lexical entries fails to address the commonalities observable in related forms such as [hav hbv bv v] for have. This paper provides a declarative analysis of the relations between the multiple forms of English auxiliaries without derivation, and without suppletion. The analysis is based on a corpus as well as data from informants, and is formalised using a computationally tractable formalism. Many of the examples cited in the paper are taken from marsec (Roach et al. 1993), a machine-readable English corpus of material taken from BBC radio broadcasts during the 1980s. The dominant variety of English in marsec is ‘standard’, although in reality this merely means that there is a variety of accents represented which tend towards RP. The database provides natural material rather than idealised or specifically elicited material. As Rischel (1992: 381) notes: ‘Phonology has been based on very exaggerated idealisations about the power of rule machinery as the format in which to take care of variation’. However, some of the structures needed in the analysis presented in this paper do not occur in marsec, so the natural material is complemented by material based on native informants.

While prosodic systems are typically either tonal or metrical, composite systems including both tone and metrical structure present yet another, albeit less frequent, possibility (Prince 1983, Hayes 1995). The focus of this paper is a prosodic system of the latter, more complex variety, evidenced in the Neo-štokavian dialect of Serbian or Croatian (henceforth NS; see Ivić 1958, 1985, Zec 1993). Although previously analysed as a pitch-accent system with no role allotted to the rhythmic structure (Browne & McCawley 1965, Ivić 1965, 1976, Halle 1971, Kenstowicz 1974, Lehiste & Ivić 1986, Inkelas & Zec 1988), on closer inspection NS discloses important resemblances with stress systems. Metrical structure is an independent agent in NS, as will be demonstrated here, and the entire prosodic system is characterised by a rich interplay between the tonal and metrical components.

Co-presence of tone and foot structure may in principle result in several types of interfaces between these two components. Cases documented in the literature are of two types: those in which the distribution of tone is constrained by metrical constituency, and those in which constraints operate in the opposite direction. third type of case has also been documented. In Japanese, as analysed in Poser (1984, 1990), the accentual system is tonal in nature while various templatic phenomena call for an inventory of iambic feet, yet the two systems are independent of each other and do not interact. The former type is exemplified by a number of languages extensively discussed in the literature: Creek (Haas 1977, Halle & Vergnaud 1987), Kirundi (Goldsmith 1987, Goldsmith & Sabimana 1989, Hayes 1995), Seneca (Prince 1983: 82–86), Winnebago (Susman 1943, Miner 1979, 1981, 1989, Halle & Vergnaud 1987, Hayes 1995 and the references therein) and Ancient Greek (Golston 1989, Sauzet 1989). The other type of unilateral interactions, with the rhythmic structure dependent upon the distribution of tone, is instantiated, for example, by Golin (Bunn & Bunn 1970, Hayes 1995).

In contrast, NS presents a case of bilateral interaction between tone and foot structure: tone exerts influence on the repertory of feet, and foot structure, in turn, constrains the distribution of tone. Although previously analysed as an instantiation of unilateral interaction, on a par with Golin (Inkelas & Zec 1988, Hayes 1995), new evidence to be presented here clearly disputes this position. This case is of immediate theoretical relevance for establishing the range of possible foot inventories. The resulting inventory is richer than in cases generally reported in the theoretical literature (Prince 1990, Mester 1994, Hayes 1995), and as such suggests a possible direction in which foot inventories may expand.

Semitic languages such as Hebrew and Arabic are known for what has become characterised as their discontiguous or non-concatenative morphology. In the overwhelming majority of the literature, in both ‘traditional’ and generative grammar, semantically related words in such languages are described as sharing a common ROOT, usually consisting of three consonants. Such consonantal roots are viewed as actual morphemes with lexical status. Words are formed by affixation to roots; the most common type of such affixation is the interleaving of vowels between the consonants of a root. Within current phonology, the morphological status of roots was originally expressed through a multi-tiered representation, where a root occupied a distinguished tier (e.g. McCarthy 1979, 1981). More recently the notion of root has been challenged by Bat- El (1994a), who argues, based on properties of the process of denominal verb formation (DVF) in Modern Hebrew (MH), that the concept of root can be eliminated.

In this paper, I present further arguments that there is no need to refer to roots in the process of DVF in MH. I also show that under such a view a unified, comprehensive treatment of DVF in MH is possible within Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993). This analysis goes beyond that originally presented in Bat-El (1994a), in that it has the power to predict the surface pattern of biliteral denominal verbs, whose outputs exhibit variation.

In Optimality Theory (OT), a grammar is a language-particular ranking of universal constraints (Prince & Smolensky 1993).This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant SBR- 9420424. I am grateful for comments received from Juliette Blevins, Mike Hammond, Paul de Lacy, Ania Łubowicz, Alan Prince, Doug Pulleyblank, Iggy Roca, Nick Sherrard and Jen Smith. Of course, I alone am responsible for the contents of this review. There are two types of constraints: markedness constraints prohibit (or require) certain output configurations; and faithfulness constraints demand identity in input → output mappings. Phonological generalisations are expressed by the interaction, through ranking, of these constraints.

In classical generative phonology (CGP), a grammar is a language-particular ordering of rules (Chomsky & Halle 1968). Though the rules are also language- particular, they are constructed using universal abbreviatory devices subject to an evaluation metric. Phonological generalisations are expressed by the rules and their ordering.

Hume et al. (1997) argue that in Leti, an Austronesian language spoken on Leti Island off the coast of East Timor, geminate consonants are not moraic. In particular, they focus much of their attention on the word- initial geminates of Leti, which are syllable-initial when they begin a phrase. They argue that Leti initial geminates cannot be moraic and are instead best represented as in (1), with a single root node linked to two X- slots. (The example in (1) displays a syllable with an initial geminate; the vowel is moraic. The term root indicates the consonantal root node; the features under it are not indicated.)

While Hume et al. do not explicitly extend their discussion of the representation of initial geminates by examining relevant data in other languages, they do note (pp. 397–398) that ‘given the paucity of discussion in the phonological literature concerning syllable-initial geminates, the evidence from Leti is particularly important not only for further enriching our understanding of these segments but, in addition, for serving as a testing-ground for theories of prosodic structure and the representation of geminate consonants’. From this, one could postulate a strong position in which all initial geminates have the same, non-moraic, representation. The purpose of this squib is to argue against this strong position. While the evidence provided by Hume et al. against the moraic representation of Leti initial geminates is convincing, I present evidence in this paper showing that initial geminates are moraic in other languages. In § 2 I present data from Trukese previously discussed by Churchyard (1991), Hart (1991) and Davis & Torretta (1998) that provide a compelling case for the moraic representation of word-initial geminate consonants in that language. In § 3 I suggest that the different representations of word-initial geminates in Leti and Trukese are supported by the very different phonotactics of word-initial clusters found in the two languages. Finally, in § 4 I relate the discussion on initial geminates to the peculiar patterning of palatal segments in Italian, where palatals always surface as long except in phrase-initial position. I argue that the palatal segments in Italian are moraic even when surfacing in phrase-initial position. I conclude that initial geminates may be moraic in some languages but not in others.

The first influential linguistic research on natural sign languages of the deaf is contained in a monograph by Stokoe (1960).I would like to thank Harry van der Hulst for useful comments on this review. That work demonstrated that sign language (American Sign Language in this case) could be shown to have a level of structure that corresponds to the phonological level, in that it consists of a finite list of meaningless units that combine to form all the lexical items of the language. By substituting just one of these units with another, minimal pairs could be identified. Stokoe further categorised these units into three broad types: handshape, location and movement, a categorisation which has persisted in most subsequent work. The fact that this seminal work addressed phonology rather than any other level of linguistic structure is a significant one, precisely because the physical modality of transmission is so different from that of spoken language. Despite this fact, and despite the obvious iconicity of much of the lexicon, sign languages do in fact have an abstract submorphemic level of structure.

Since Stokoe's discovery, linguists have been trying to describe that structure, and to compare it with that of spoken languages, developing approaches which are more and more informed by theoretical work on phonology of spoken languages. Two inherent problems have challenged researchers in this field: (i) to pinpoint the similarities and differences between the phonology of spoken languages and that of sign languages; and (ii) to understand the mutual relevance of sign language phonology and general phonological theory. Brentari's book about the phonology of American Sign Language (ASL) is the most recent attempt to rise to these challenges.

The goals that Bernhardt & Stemberger set for themselves in this bookI would like to thank Todd Bailey, Barbara Bernhardt, Dan Dinnsen, Heather Goad, Sharon Hargus, Linda Lombardi, John McCarthy, Geoffrey Nathan, Elena Nicoladis, Alan Prince, Paul Smolensky, Joseph Stemberger and Wolf Wikeley for their comments on a draft of this review, and the Rutgers Optimality Archive (http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/roa.html) for facilitating its distribution. This work was supported by SSHRC research grant 410-98-1595, for which I am grateful. are extremely ambitious. Assuming only a very basic knowledge of phonological theory on the part of the reader, they aim to provide an introduction to non-linear phonology and to its constraint-based implementation in Optimality Theory, and to show how this framework can describe and illuminate a wide range of data on phonological development, as well as how the child data can inform theory construction. In doing this, they also present what they claim is a comprehensive inventory of the attested phenomena of child phonology, as well as a new proposal about the nature and range of possible constraints in Optimality Theory. The scope of the book is widened even further by the authors' use of data from children with both normal and delayed phonological development, and by their use of theoretical constructs drawn from literature on processing and connectionism. These ambitious and wide-ranging goals match the relatively large and diverse audience that Bernhardt & Stemberger hope to reach with this book: theoretical phonologists, researchers examining phonological development from various linguistic and psychological perspectives, and speech-language pathologists.

For its depth and breadth of theoretical and empirical coverage, this book will be of considerable value to anyone involved in phonological theory that has an interest in child phonology (although depending on one's circumstances, this value may or may not match the publisher's asking price of $149·95). As a phonologist working in Optimality Theory and acquisition, I was impressed with the extent to which the ideas, data and references to earlier work were new to me. I now turn to this book regularly to help answer questions about phonological development, both those that come up in my own research and those raised by colleagues and students.