Generalised Template Theory holds that templatic restrictions on reduplicative morphemes follow from independent, general principles. Under lexically indexed constraint theory, however, reduplicants are in no way special – morpheme-specific constraints may apply just to reduplicants. This article presents reduplication patterns in Tonkawa, which are argued to require reduplicant-specific constraints. In Tonkawa, the reduplicant is limited in size to CV, and is usually syllabified as a light syllable. Even though the language typically prefers heavy syllables word-initially, they are light if the syllable is a reduplicative prefix. This size restriction is backcopied onto the first syllable of the base. In the context of the prosodic phonology of Tonkawa, this pattern can only be understood if there is a reduplicant-specific prohibition against heavy syllables. This prohibition is formulated in terms of lexically indexed constraints on the reduplicant, which allows for a nuanced understanding of the emergent CV template.

This paper is about opaque interactions between phonological processes in the two senses defined by Kiparsky (1971, 1973) and discussed in much recent work on the topic, most notably McCarthy (1999) : underapplication opacity, whereby a process appears to have failed to apply in expected contexts on the surface, and overapplication opacity, whereby a process appears to have applied in unexpected contexts on the surface. Specifically, I demonstrate that there are three distinct types of overapplication opacity in addition to the only case discussed and properly categorised as such in the literature, counterbleeding. The analysis of each type of opacity in terms of rule-based serialism and in terms of Optimality Theory is discussed, emphasising the strengths and weaknesses of the two frameworks in each case.

An overview of the historical phonology of the Austronesian languages shows certain recurrent patterns of change that resemble the synchronic notion of a conspiracy. Over 90% of all lexical bases in Proto-Austronesian and other early Austronesian proto-languages are disyllabic. This dominant pattern, which was transmitted to most of the 1200-plus Austronesian languages spoken today, has tended repeatedly to reassert itself in forms that have come to have other than two syllables. As a structurally defined target that is satisfied by diverse historical changes, this preferential disyllabism can be considered an ‘attractor’ in the sense of Kelso (1995). Perhaps the most interesting consequence of disyllabic attractors in Austronesian historical phonology is the widespread occurrence of syncope only between identical consonants, a pattern that Odden (1988) has characterised in synchronic systems as one of ‘anti-antigemination’.

This paper investigates predictions made by the ‘phonetic knowledge hypothesis’ (Jun 1995, 2004, Hayes & Steriade 2004) about the relation between perceptibility of stops and common patterns of major place assimilation. In two perceptual experiments, stimuli with Russian released and unreleased voiceless stops in clusters were presented for identification of 56 listeners, native speakers of Russian, Canadian English, Korean and Taiwanese Mandarin. Percentages of correct responses and reaction time data were used to determine scales of perceptual salience. Results reveal considerable perceptual differences between places of articulation, consistent across four language groups. Perceptual salience of place of articulation was strongly affected by presence or absence of stop releases. While the salience scale for released stops closely corresponded to cross-linguistic patterns of assimilation, the scale for unreleased stops did not. The results provide partial support for the hypothesis, while suggesting a less direct relation between scales of phonetic difficulty and phonological markedness.

Romance languages show hiatus and diphthongal realisations of inherited iV sequences of rising sonority (e.g. ia). We study five Romance varieties with different degrees of contrast between the two realisation types: Romanian, with a diphthong–hiatus contrast, Spanish, with a weaker contrast, French, with no contrast (all diphthongs), and European and Brazilian Portuguese, with no contrast (all hiatus). We show that the different degrees of synchronic contrast are related to three independent factors: (i) a general articulatory tendency for [iV] hiatus to resolve to diphthongs, due to the relative stability of diphthongal articulations; (ii) a structural ‘attractor’ effect of pre-existing [jV] diphthongs in a language, from different historical sources; and (iii) prosodic lengthening effects which inhibit the shift from hiatus to diphthong, supported by phonetic studies of durational patterns across the five languages.

This study examines how phonetic details produced by non-bilingual borrowers (‘disseminators’) are categorised when new words are transmitted to the monolinguals of the borrowing language community (‘recipients’). The stimuli are based on research showing that the schwa inserted by English speakers into non-native clusters (e.g. /zgɑmo/→[zəgɑmo]) differs acoustically from lexical schwa (e.g. [zəgɑmo]). In Experiment 1, listeners transcribed Cluster (CC), Lexical (CəC) and Transitional (CəC) stimuli produced by an English speaker. Transcriptions of CəC stimuli were split between CC and CVC, and participants wrote CəC with a vowel less often than they did CəC. Experiment 2 demonstrated that listeners had difficulty discriminating between CəC and both CC and CəC. These findings suggest that CəC is acoustically intermediate between clusters and schwas; thus recipients may assign CəC token to either of the phonotactic categories CC or CəC. The ramifications of these findings for loanwords and the acquisition of phonological contrast are discussed.

The advent of Optimality Theory has revived the interest in articulatorily and perceptually driven markedness in phonological research. To some researchers, the cross-linguistic prevalence of such markedness relations is indication that synchronic phonological grammar should include phonetic details. However, there are at least two distinct ways in which phonetics can be incorporated in an optimality-theoretic grammar: traditional constraint domination and Flemming (2001) 's proposal that the costs of constraint violations should be weighted and summed. I argue that constraint weighting is unnecessary as an innovation in Optimality Theory. The arguments are twofold. First, using constraint families with intrinsic rankings, constraint domination formally predicts the same range of phonological realisations as constraint weighting. Second, with proper constraint definitions and rankings, both the additive effect and the locus effect predicted by constraint weighting can be replicated in constraint domination.

Consonant harmony involves long-distance featural assimilation, or agreement, of consonants across intervening segments. Current correspondence-based analyses of such sound patterns assume that they originate in the cognitive exigencies of articulatory planning, either synchronically, through the functional grounding of the constraints responsible, or diachronically, whereby processing factors incrementally shape the lexicon over time. This paper challenges the validity of this assumption as an all-purpose functional explanation for the full range of long-distance consonant agreement patterns by demonstrating that a variety of diachronic trajectories underlies their emergence and evolution. Focusing on the comparatively rare phenomenon of secondary articulation agreement, the evolutionary histories of three cases are examined: (labio)velarisation agreement in Pohnpeian (Oceanic), palatalisation agreement in Karaim (Turkic) and pharyngealisation agreement in Tsilhqot'in (Athabaskan). These histories provide explanations for a range of synchronic properties of the systems in question, some of which are problematic for restrictive typologies of consonant harmony.

This article presents a non-finality approach to weight-sensitivity, using constraints that prohibit stress on domain-final moras to account for phenomena where stress avoids light syllables. The issues addressed by the proposal include weight-sensitivity in unbounded stress systems, weight-sensitivity in generalised trochee systems, iambic lengthening, trochaic lengthening and minimal word restrictions. A non-finality approach improves the typological predictions for each of these phenomena and provides them with a general and uniform account, lending additional support for non-finality's central position in the theory.

Laryngeal realism (Honeybone 2005) holds that thoroughly voiced stops in a language like Dutch will be represented phonologically with the feature [voice], leaving the voiceless unaspirated stops laryngeally neutral, whereas the typically aspirated stops of a language like German are marked with the feature [spread glottis], rendering the passively voiced stops in this language neutral. These two languages also merge laryngeal oppositions in final environments, Dutch undergoing final devoicing but German final fortition. We apply the findings of Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins 2004, 2006b) to these distinctions in final laryngeal neutralisation, underscoring that the evolutionary approach to phonological alternation allows for non-assimilatory feature addition as well as loss. We examine in particular the known history of final fortition in German and find that the reference standard form of the language has evolved an alignment condition to the effect that a fortified syllable edge must match up with the morpheme edge.

In Classical Arabic and many modern Arabic dialects, syllables ending in VVC or in the left leg of a geminate have a special status. An examination of Kiparsky's (2003) semisyllable account of syllabification types and related phenomena in Arabic against a wider set of data shows that while this account explains much syllable-related variation, certain phenomena cannot be captured, and several dialects appear to exhibit conflicting syllable-related phenomena. Phenomena not readily covered by the semisyllable account commonly involve long segments – long vowels or geminate consonants. In this paper, I propose for relevant dialects a mora-sharing solution that recognises the special status of syllables incorporating long segments. Such a mora-sharing solution is not new, but has been proposed for the analysis of syllables containing long segments in a number of languages, including Arabic (Broselow 1992, Broselow et al.1995), Malayalam, Hindi (Broselow et al.1997) and Bantu languages (Maddieson 1993, Hubbard 1995).

Phonologies are characterised by regularity, from the stereotyped phonetic characteristics of allophones to the contextually conditioned alternations between them. Most models of grammar account for regularity by hypothesising that there is only a limited set of symbols for expressing underlying forms, and that an independent grammar algorithm transforms symbol sequences into an output representation. However, this explanation for regularity is called into question by research which suggests that the mental lexicon records rich phonetic detail that directly informs production. Given evidence for biases favouring previously experienced forms at many levels of production and perception, I argue that positive feedback within a richly detailed lexicon can produce regularity over many cycles of production and perception. Using simulation as a tool, I show that under the influence of positive feedback, gradient biases in usage can convert an initially gradient and variable distribution of lexical behaviours into a more categorical and simpler pattern.

A growing body of work on exemplar-based theories of learning suggests the possibility of formal models of phonological representation which will offer deeper explanations of basic phonological properties than current models allow. The main purpose of this paper is to shed light on near merger, a recalcitrant problem in sound change and in phonological theory, with this newer perspective, through a case study of tonal near merger in Cantonese.