A number of phonological laws require adjacent elements to stand a certain distance apart from each other on some prominence scale. For example, according to the Syllable Contact Law, the greater the sonority slope between the coda and the following onset, the better. Languages such as Faroese, Icelandic, Sidamo, Kazakh and Kirghiz select different thresholds for an acceptable sonority slope. This article proposes a theory for deriving hierarchies of relational constraints such as the Syllable Contact Law from prominence scales in the constraint set CON in Optimality Theory. The proposal is compared to two alternative approaches, non-hierarchical constraints and the local conjunction of constraint hierarchies, which are argued to make undesirable empirical and theoretical predictions.

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Speakers learn detailed generalizations about the morphophonology of their language, and extend them to nonce words. We propose a theory of this morphophonological knowledge that partitions the lexicon into uniform and productive sublexicons. Each sublexicon has its own phonotactic grammar, which the speaker uses as an inference mechanism to determine the relative productivity of each sublexicon. We report the results of an experiment on the generalization of mid vowel deletion ("yer" deletion) in Russian, showing that speakers encode source-oriented generalizations about the shapes of words that can undergo vowel deletion, as well as product-oriented generalizations about words that result from vowel deletion. An implementation of our model learns the patterns of deletion and captures both source-oriented and productoriented generalizations.*For their insightful questions, comments, and suggestions, we wish to thank

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 chapter presents an overview of Optimality Theory (OT) as applied to phonology. OT is a theory of constraint interaction in grammar, which aims to solve a couple of problems that have confronted generative phonological theory since its earliest days. The first problem is conspiracies: in some languages, there is a constraint that seems to be satisfied in a variety of ways, as if the rules conspire to achieve a single target. The second problem is soft universals: unrelated languages show evidence of the same or similar constraints, but the constraints do not seem to hold in all languages. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 21.2 describes the architecture of OT, including its basic components and approach to typology. Section 21.3 addresses the status of the lexicon in OT. Section 21.4 and 21.5 describe some work on learnability, acquisition, and variation, and Section 21.6 concludes.

A famous perennial problem in Slavic phonology is yers: vowels that idiosyncratically alternate with zero (e.g., [mox] vs.

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Even though vowel deletion in Russian is lexically-restricted, the identity of alternating vowels is partially predictable: only mid vowels delete, but even mid vowels cannot delete in some contexts. We report on two nonce word studies asking Russian speakers to rate paradigms in which a vowel was deleted. The ratings strongly correlated with the quality of the vowel: deletion of mid vowels was rated higher than deletion of high and low vowels. We also found that deletion in certain syllabic contexts was rated as ungrammatical: deletion cannot affect words that have a complex coda, and it cannot create clusters with a medial sonorant. Finally, deletion in disyllables was rated higher than deletion in monosyllables, reflecting the trends in the lexicon. These results suggest that even for this lexically-restricted alternation, speakers have formed a phonological generalization.