No abstract

In child language, consonants often assimilate in primary place of articulation across intervening vowels. In adult language, primary place assimilation occurs only between adjacent consonants. In both cases, the first consonant usually assimilates to the second. The standard analysis of directionality of local assimilation in Optimality Theory uses positional faithfulness to protect the second consonant. In this article, it is argued that directionality in child language assimilation is due not to positional faithfulness, but to a markedness constraint that specifies that a consonant preceding a dorsal must agree in place of articulation with it. Along with directionality, this constraint accounts for cases in which dorsals, but not labials, trigger assimilation, which occurs in Korean as well as in child language. Differences between the attested types of assimilation in adult and child language can be explained by differences in the activity of positional faithfulness in the two domains.

Among the Southern Wakashan languages, Ditidaht has patterns of short vowel epenthesis and deletion that are unusually complex. It is shown that the surface presence or absence of short vowels is determined not by their underlying presence or absence, but by how segments are parsed by prosodic constituents. An optimality theoretic analysis is developed, according to which vowel alternations result from the low ranking of faithfulness constraints (Max/V and Dep/V) relative to constraints on the forms of syllables, feet, and prosodic words. Vowel presence creates ideal iambic feet, makes prosodic words minimally disyllabic, and ensures that adducted consonants (those that involve adducting the vocal folds for glottalization or voicing) are vowel-adjacent. Vowel absence ensures that prosodic words end in consonants, and eliminates unfooted syllables. An additional finding is that all adducted consonants must be postvocalic.

In the Salish language Halkomelem, there are numerous functional elements that we identify as clitics. In this study, we seek to improve our understanding of Halkomelem clitics by classifying them according to their syntactic and phonological properties. We look in particular at data from the Island dialect, called Hul'q'umi'num'.First, based on their patterns of syntactic placement, we classify Hul'q'umi'num' clitics into two general types, inner and outer. Inner clitics are more constrained in their placement than outer clitics. When they co-occur, inner clitics are closer to the host than outer clitics are. Second, we examine Hul'q'umi'num' clitics in terms of phonological integration, showing that clitics are less integrated than affixes, and, furthermore, that clitics that follow their hosts are more integrated than those that precede their hosts.Finally, we analyze the prosodic representations of Hul'q'umi'num' clitics within Prosodic Clitic Theory. We propose that clitics receive at least three different parses in Hul'q'umi'num', namely internal enclisis, adjoined proclisis, and free clisis. That is, clitics can be parsed at the right edge of a prosodic word, at the left edge of a recursive prosodic word, or directly by a phonological phrase. While Hul'q'umi'num' clitics exhibit a range of behaviors, those clitics with more constrained syntactic placement are generally more phonologically integrated, and vice-versa.

No abstract