Morphologically Governed Accent in Optimality Theory

Abstract

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...

Morphological alternations at the intonational phrase edge

“…The reason is that allomorphy should be driven by independently motivated prosodic constraints outranking morphological constraints, or it should be attributable to the emergence of the unmarked. Although at first pass the status suffixes appear to be a good candidate for a treatment with prosodic subcategorization frames (Inkelas 1990;Paster 2006), I will argue that we can better understand their distribution in terms of output optimization, using a natural extension of work by Alderete (1999) on affix controlled stress. Alderete (1999) presents a series of languages where individual affixes are lexically specified for stress, and actual stress placement is determined by the properties of the root and whether or not the affix is inherently stressed.…”

“…This is an important result, especially for the status suffix placement, because at first pass the distribution of status suffixes seems most amenable to an analysis that makes use of prosodic subcategorization frames. The crucial insight is that status suffixes are lexically specified as heading a section of prosodic structure, analagous to other cases of affix-controlled stress (Alderete 1999). The fact that K'ichee' phrase-final allomorph selection is optimizing for stress placement is interesting because it allows us to assimilate these phenomena to the much more common cases where suppletive allmorphy is triggered by metrical structure at the word or foot level (Paster 2006).…”

Against Root Faithfulness in Cupeño Stress

“…The same is true for Tokyo Japanese and for Russian, the two principal case studies besides Cupeño treated by Alderete (1999Alderete ( , 2001a in his cross-linguistic study of LA systems. Alderete proposes extending the RCA analysis to word stress in these languages, but acknowledges that both can equally be analyzed in terms of a phonological preference for edge-oriented stress.…”

Reduplication in Hawaiian: variations on a theme of minimal word

“…Optimality Theory is well suited for this task, because the output nature of analysis and the design of certain classes of constraints make it possible to integrate morphological and phonological facts in a unified analysis (see e.g., McCarthy & Prince 1993). Our proposal for relating the patterns is that they result from a lexically specified correspondence relation associated with each pattern (Fukazawa 1999, Itô & Mester 1999; see also Alderete 2001, Benua 2000. As we shall see, such an analysis grapples directly with both phonological and morphological characteristics because lexical specification of correspondence relations allows for a direct treatment of the differences and similarities in (14).…”

“…Since there are only markedness constraints and constraints defined on correspondence relations, this hypothesis entails that exceptional patterns in grammar must be described with different orderings of correspondence-defined constraints, i.e., faithfulness constraints, anchoring constraints, and antifaithfulness constraints (Alderete 2001). In Itô & Mester (1995), prior to correspondence-theoretic faithfulness, this was characterized as a limit on constraint reranking such that lexical strata only differed in the rank order of faithfulness constraints.…”