Fixed segmentism is the phenomenon whereby a reduplicative morpheme contains segments that are invariant rather than copied. We investigate it within Optimality Theory, arguing that it falls into two distinct types, phonological and morphological. Phonological fixed segmentism is analyzed under the OT rubric of emergence of the unmarked. It therefore has significant connections to markedness theory, sharing properties with other domains where markedness is relevant and showing context-dependence. In contrast, morphological fixed segmentism is a kind of affixation, and so it resembles affixing morphology generally. The two types are contrasted, and claims about impossible patterns of fixed segmentism are developed.

All Rights Reserved iii NEAR KLAMATHWe stand around the burning oil drum and we warm ourselves, our hands and faces, in its pure lapping heat.We raise steaming cups of coffee to our lips and we drink it with both hands. But we are salmon fisherman. And now we stamp our feet on the snow and rocks and move upstream, slowly, full of love, toward the still pools.-Raymond Carver, Fires iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This was the first time that I worked on a project of this size and scope and I am indebted to the members of my committee, John McCarthy, Lisa Selkirk, John Kingston, and Bob Rothstein, for their guidance and support throughout the endeavor. I am also grateful to Alan Prince, who, while not a formal member of the committee, went beyond his role as a consultant and provided many important comments on all aspects of this thesis. I found it tremendously encouraging to sit across from these linguists and find that they had put aside the time to read and respond cogently to the bulky materials stuffed in their boxes. Thank you for allowing me the space to develop my ideas, slowing me down when I was rushing, and sweating the details when I no longer could.I would also like to express my gratitude to all those who have contributed over the years to my professional and intellectual development. There is a long road between putting together a good homework solution and writing a dissertation, and the support I received from my committee and the larger faculty at UMass was essential to my arriving at where I am today. Many others aside from the committee have helped me come to understand myself as a linguist, but those at the forefront of my mind include Emmon Bach, Roger Higgins, Angelika Kratzer, and Ellen Woolford, and also my teachers and advisors at UC Santa Cruz, Junko Itô, Sandra Chung, and Bill Ladusaw.The idea that served as the point of departure for this thesis, namely that the accentual properties of roots play a major role in governing word accent, was first hit upon in the summer of 1995 in the weekly brown bag meetings of John McCarthy's NSF grant. I am grateful to John for providing that environment, and for the creative input and expert advice of the participants of those meetings, including Jill Beckman, Laura Benua, Amalia Gnanadesikan, Suzanne Urbanczyk, and in later years, Toni Borowsky, Patrik Bye, Katy Carlson, Paul De Lacy, Mark Harvey, Anna Lubowicz, Caroline Jones, Jennifer Smith, and Rachel Walker. Other opportunities for presenting my research contributed greatly to the preparation of this thesis, including a series of informal meetings at Rutgers and MIT, and invited talks at Cornell University, SUNY Stoney Brook, University of British Columbia, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Victoria. Thanks to the audiences of these gatherings for their helpful comments and questions.Like most dissertations in linguistics, the argumentation developed in this one revolves around the presentation of evidence, and I would like to thank the language experts and consultants who helped in the colle...

This paper presents a theory of morphophonology based on a development in the theory of faithfulness in Optimality Theory. A new constraint type, anti-faithfulness, is proposed that evaluates a pair of related words and requires an alternation in the shared stem. This constraint type is motivated initially by a set of problems, e.g. morphological deletions, segmental exchanges and non-structure preserving processes, which show that morphophonology must encompass more than markedness–faithfulness interactions. The anti-faithfulness thesis is then applied to accentual processes in which affixes idiosyncratically cause deletion of accent in a neighbouring morpheme. It is argued that anti-faithfulness both motivates the observed deletion and accounts for its properties with principles that are generally available in phonological theory. Anti-faithfulness is then shown to extend naturally to the analysis of other affix-induced alternations, including accent insertions, shifts, and retractions of stress and tone, a result which distinguishes this theory from plausible alternatives.

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This work describes a methodology of collecting speech errors from audio recordings and investigates how some of its assumptions affect data quality and composition. Speech errors of all types (sound, lexical, syntactic, etc.) were collected by eight data collectors from audio recordings of unscripted English speech. Analysis of these errors showed that: (i) different listeners find different errors in the same audio recordings, but (ii) the frequencies of error patterns are similar across listeners; (iii) errors collected "online" using on the spot observational techniques are more likely to be affected by perceptual biases than "offline" errors collected from audio recordings; and (iv) datasets built from audio recordings can be explored and extended in a number of ways that traditional corpus studies cannot be.