No abstract

Empty categories – positions in phonological representations that have no direct phonetic counterpart – are (still) controversial in phonological theory. In this paper we give the main arguments for assuming such positions and we furthermore establish a markedness hierarchy for empty positions: some of them are stronger (‘more marked’) than others, and we can derive this from a combination of Element Theory and Turbidity Theory. We illustrate our point with Italian and Dutch dialects, and point out that the phonological hierarchy of empty positions may correspond to a hierarchy of syntactic positions.

No abstract

In the literature on Dutch morphosyntactic microvariation, it is sometimes assumed that a subpart of Dutch dialects lack certain morphemes, because they have no direct phonetic exponent. More careful analyses, however, suggest that these dialects display so-called zero morphemes, whose presence is argued for either on paradigmatic or phonological ground. In this contribution, we present some examples of such morphemes in the verbal inflection and adjectival concord systems, and develop an analysis that, by exploiting the formal mechanism relating underlying and surface phonological representations provided by Turbidity Theory, allows for the formalization of various degrees of emptiness: morphosyntactic, phonological and phonetic. This, in turn, allows for the shifting of the burden of (some instances of) microvariation from morphosyntax to PF.

The aim of this paper is to check the factorial typology for a set of phonological constraints on vowel interactions in Basque against corpus data (Hualde and Gaminde 1998, Euskararen Herri Hizkeren Atlasa, 'The Basque Dialectological Atlas') with the help of OT-Help 2.0 (Staubs et al. 2010), a specialized software that calculates factorial typologies. The formal analysis developed to account for different patterns of vowel interactions in Basque, including those patterns displaying phonological opacity, implements Element Theory (Backley 2011) in Turbidity Theory (Goldrick 2001, Van Oostendorp 2008. The proposed analysis has the virtue of predicting all attested patterns of a specific type of vowel interactions in Basque and excluding the unattested patterns.