One of the common assumptions of standard metrical phonology (Hayes 1981) is that rules of stress placement do not refer to the weight or nature of syllable onsets. This is most clearly stated in Halle & Vergnaud (1980:93): ‘in all languages known to us, stress assignment rules are sensitive to the structure of the syllable rime, but disregard completely the character of the onset’. This assumption has been attacked by both Davis (1982, 1985a, b) and Everett & Everett (1984). These researchers have pointed to a number of languages which seem to have stress-placement rules that are sensitive to the nature of the syllable onset. For example, Davis (1985a, b) notes that Western Aranda (an Arandic language of Australia) has a stress rule that places main stress on the initial syllable if it begins with a consonant; otherwise stress falls on the second syllable. However, if the word is bisyllabic, stress must fall on the initial syllable, since final syllables are always extrametrical.

Languages that have both aspirated stops and the phoneme /h/ often manifest a close parallel in their distribution. Previous work in phonology either has failed to recognize this close parallel or does not formally account for it. For example, American English witnesses a close parallel in the distribution of /h/ and aspirated stops that has largely gone unrecognized in the phonological literature. This paper offers a detailed optimality-theoretic analysis of the distribution of aspirated stops and /h/ for both American English and Korean. For each of these languages we delineate their distribution and show how an optimality-theoretic analysis can account for it. We develop an alignment analysis of their distribution that makes reference to constraints that require positions of prominence (such as word-initial or foot-initial position) to be aligned with the feature [spread glottis]. We further demonstrate how the alignment analysis predicts a typology of patterning of aspirated stops and /h/. Crucially, the typology does not predict that every language should have a close parallel in their distribution like American English, but as we show, it predicts a range of patterns that are instantiated. Languages that have both aspirated stops and the phoneme /h/ frequently manifest a close parallel in their distribution. This is not surprising given that such sounds are characterized by the feature [spread glottis] (henceforth, [s.g.]). Previous work in phonology either has failed to recognize the close distributional parallel between aspirated stops and /h/ or does not formally account for it. For example, virtually none of the work on American English phonology observes the similarity of distribution that exists between them. In this paper we develop an alignment analysis of the feature [s.g.] that accounts for the close parallel in the distribution of /h/ and aspirated stops. In the first part of this paper we illustrate the close

In many languages the issue arises as to whether an onglide patters as part of the syllable onset or forms the first part of a (rising) diphthong with the immediately following vowel. If it is part of the syllable onset, the structure of a CGV syllable would be as in (1), but if it forms the first part of a diphthong the structure of a CGV syllable could either be as in (2a) with a monomoraic diphthong (where the glide is ‘co-moraic’ with the following vowel) or as in (2b) with a bimoraic diphthong (C = consonant, G = glide, V = vowel, μ = mora, and σ = syllable).

In examining the history of /ay/-raising before voiceless consonants in Philadelphia, Josef Fruehwald (2016) concludes that either categorical phonological conditioning was present from the very onset of this phonetic change, or the period of purely phonetic conditioning was too brief to be identified. This is based on the observation that raising is phonological in the Philadelphia data: it occurs before voiced flaps that are underlyingly voiceless (as in writing), but not before underlyingly voiced flaps (as in riding). In this response, we provide the first acoustic documentation of an English variety that shows an incipient phase of /ay/-raising where the conditioning environment is purely phonetic.*

In Italian there are two forms of the masculine definite article: il and lo. Their distribution appears quite anomalous. The form il occurs before nouns and adjectives that begin with a single consonant; it also occurs before nouns and adjectives that begin with a specific set of consonant clusters. The article lo occurs before nouns and adjectives that begin with a vowel or glide; additionally, it occurs before nouns or adjectives that begin with a different set of consonant clusters. This paper addresses the question whether or not there is any way of characterizing the group of sounds that il can precede and the group of sounds that lo can precede. It is shown that by adopting the syllable-formation rules proposed in Steriade (1982) and a languagespecific sonority (or strength) hierarchy for Italian, the distribution of\\ and lo can be accounted for by the following generalization: il occurs before nouns and adjectives that begin with a consonant which is syllabified as part of the syllable onset, while lo occurs before nouns and adjectives that do not begin with such.