Identity Relations in Grammar

Few concepts are as ubiquitous in the physical world of humans as that of identity. Laws of nature crucially involve relations of identity and nonidentity, the act of identifying is central to most cognitive processes, and the structure of human language is determined in many different ways by considerations of identity and its opposite. The purpose of this book is to bring together research from a broad scale of domains of grammar that have a bearing on the role that identity plays in the structure of grammatical representations and principles.Beyond a great many analytical puzzles, the creation and avoidance of identity in grammar raise a lot of fundamental and hard questions. These include:Why is identity sometimes tolerated or even necessary, while in other contexts it must be avoided?What are the properties of complex elements that contribute to configurations of identity (XX)?What structural notions of closeness or distance determine whether an offending XXrelation exists or, inversely, whether two more or less distant elements satisfy some requirement of identity?Is it possible to generalize over the specific principles that govern (non)identity in the various components of grammar, or are such comparisons merely metaphorical?Indeed, can we define the notion of identity in a formal way that will allow us to decide which of the manifold phenomena that we can think of are genuine instances of some identity (avoidance) effect?If identity avoidance is a manifestation in grammar of some much more encompassing principle, some law of nature, then how is it possible that what does and what does not count as identical in the grammars of different languages seems to be subject to considerable variation?

Identity Relations in Grammar

Henk van Riemsdijk

Harry van der Hulst

Norbert Corver

Jan Koster

De Gruyter Mouton

e-ISBN (ePub) 978-1-61451-898-3

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-61451-811-2

ISSN 0167-4331

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche

Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet

at http://dnb.dnb.de.

” 2014 Walter de Gruyter, Inc., Boston/Berlin

Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck

앪 앝 Printed on acid-free paper

Printed in Germany

www.degruyter.com

Contributors viiIntroduction 1

Kuniya Nasukawa and Henk van Riemsdijk

Part I: Phonology

Contrastiveness: The basis of identity avoidance 13

Kuniya Nasukawa and Phillip Backley

Rhyme as phonological multidominance 39

Marc van Oostendorp

Babbling, intrinsic input and the statistics of identical transvocalic

consonants in English monosyllables: Echoes of the Big Bang? 59

Patrik Bye

Identity avoidance in the onset 101

Toyomi Takahashi

Part II: Morpho-Syntax

Unifying minimality and the OCP: Local anti-identity as economy 123

M Rita Manzini

Semantic versus syntactic agreement in anaphora: The role of identity avoidance 161

Peter Ackema

Part III: Syntax

Exploring the limitations of identity effects in syntax 199

Wei-wen Roger Liao

Part IV: General

Linguistic and non-linguistic identity effects: Same or different? 323

Peter Ackema is Reader in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh His

research interests are in the areas of theoretical syntax and morphology, particularly concerning issues surrounding the interaction between these

two modules of grammar He is the author of Issues in Morphosyntax (John Benjamins 1999) and co-author with Ad Neeleman of Beyond Morphology

(OUP 2004), and has published articles on a range of topics such asagreement, pro drop, compounding and incorporation, verb movement, andlexical integrity effects

Artemis Alexiadou is Professor of Theoretical and English Linguistics at

the Universität Stuttgart She obtained her Ph.D at the University of Potsdam Her research interests lie in theoretical and comparative syntax, with special focus on the interfaces between syntax and morphology and syntax and the lexicon

Phillip Backley is Professor of English Linguistics at Tohoku Gakuin

University, Japan His research interests cover various aspects of segmental and prosodic phonology, with a focus on how the two interact to constrain

the phonologies of individual languages He is author of An Introduction to

Element Theory (EUP 2011) and co-editor (with Kuniya Nasukawa) of Strength Relations in Phonology (Mouton 2009).

Patrik Bye is a researcher affiliated to the University of Nordland, Bodø,

Norway He has published scholarly articles on a number of topics including the syllable structure, quantity and stress systems of the Finno-Ugric languages, notably Saami, North Germanic accentology and historical phonology, derivations, dissimilation, phonologically conditioned allomorphy and, with Peter Svenonius, morphological exponence He is the

co-editor with Martin Krämer and Sylvia Blaho of Freedom of Analysis?

(Mouton 2007)

Peter Ackema is Reader in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh His

research interests are in the areas of theoretical syntax and morphology, particularly concerning issues surrounding the interaction between these

two modules of grammar He is the author of Issues in Morphosyntax (John Benjamins 1999) and co-author with Ad Neeleman of Beyond Morphology

(OUP 2004), and has published articles on a range of topics such asagreement, pro drop, compounding and incorporation, verb movement, andlexical integrity effects

Artemis Alexiadou is Professor of Theoretical and English Linguistics at

the Universität Stuttgart She obtained her Ph.D at the University of Potsdam Her research interests lie in theoretical and comparative syntax, with special focus on the interfaces between syntax and morphology and syntax and the lexicon

Phillip Backley is Professor of English Linguistics at Tohoku Gakuin

University, Japan His research interests cover various aspects of segmental and prosodic phonology, with a focus on how the two interact to constrain

the phonologies of individual languages He is author of An Introduction to

Element Theory (EUP 2011) and co-editor (with Kuniya Nasukawa) of Strength Relations in Phonology (Mouton 2009).

Patrik Bye is a researcher affiliated to the University of Nordland, Bodø,

Norway He has published scholarly articles on a number of topics including the syllable structure, quantity and stress systems of the Finno-Ugric languages, notably Saami, North Germanic accentology and historical phonology, derivations, dissimilation, phonologically conditioned allomorphy and, with Peter Svenonius, morphological exponence He is the

co-editor with Martin Krämer and Sylvia Blaho of Freedom of Analysis?

(Mouton 2007)

Ken Hiraiwa has worked on the syntax of various languages and published

a number of descriptive and theoretical articles He got his Ph.D at MIT in

2005 and is currently an associate professor of linguistics at Meiji Gakuin

University

Kyle Johnson earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the

University of California at Irvine in 1981 and a PhD from MIT in 1986 He

studies the relationship between syntax and semantics, with an emphasis on

movement, ellipsis, anaphora and argument structure He teaches at the

University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he has been since 1992

Wei-wen Roger Liao holds a PhD in linguistics from University of

Southern California, and is currently an Assistant Research Fellow at the

Institute of Linguistics in Academia Sinica His publications and research

cover various aspects of Chinese linguistics, comparative syntax, the

syntax-semantics interface, and biolinguistics

M Rita Manzini has been Professor at the University of Florence since

1992, after taking her Ph.D at MIT in 1983, and holding positions at UC

Irvine (1983-84) and at University College London (1984-1992) She is the

(co-)author of several volumes including Locality (MIT Press 1992) and

with Leonardo Savoia I dialetti Italiani (ed dell’Orso 2005, 3vols.),

Unify-ing Morphology and Syntax (Routledge 2007), Grammatical Categories

(CUP 2011) She has also published about one hundred articles in journals

and books on themes related to the formal modelling of morphosyntax,

language universals and variation, including studies on locality, voice,

graphs, agreement and Case, specifically in Italo-Romance and in Albanian

Kuniya Nasukawa is Professor of English Linguistics at Tohoku Gakuin

University, Japan He has a Ph.D in Linguistics from University College

London (UCL), and his research interests include prosody-melody

interac-tion and precedence-free phonology He has written many articles covering

a wide range of topics in phonological theory He is author of A Unified

Approach to Nasality and Voicing (Mouton 2005), co-editor (with Phillip

Backley) of Strength Relations in Phonology (Mouton 2009), and co-editor

(with Nancy C Kula and Bert Botma) of The Bloomsbury Companion to

Phonology (Bloomsbury 2013).

Marc van Oostendorp is Senior Researcher at the Department of

Varia-tionist Linguistics at the Meertens Institute of the Royal Netherlands emy of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Phonological Microvariation at the University of Leiden He holds an MA in Computational Linguistics and a PhD from Tilburg University He is co-editor (with Colin J Ewen,

Acad-Elizabeth V Hume and Keren Rice) of The Blackwell Companion to

Pho-nology (Wiley-Blackwell 2011)

Henk van Riemsdijk was, until recently, Professor of Linguistics and head

of the Models of Grammar Group at Tilburg University, The Netherlands

He is now emeritus and a free-lance linguist operating from his home in Arezzo, Italy He is the co-founder of GLOW, the major professional organization of generative linguists in Europe He was (from 2001 through 2013) the co-editor of the Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics (Springer) and of the book series Studies in Generative Grammar, Mouton

de Gruyter (from 1978 through 2013) And he co-edits the Blackwell

Comprehensive Grammar Resources series (Amsterdam University Press)

He has written and edited around 25 books, contributed around 100 articles and directed around 30 Ph.D Dissertations

Bridget Samuels is Senior Editor for the Center of Craniofacial Molecular

Biology at the University of Southern California She is the author of the

2011 Oxford University Press monograph, Phonological Architecture: A

Biolinguistic Perspective Previously, she held positions at the California

Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland, College Park She received her Ph.D in Linguistics from Harvard University in 2009

Toyomi Takahashi is Professor of English at Toyo University, Tokyo,

Japan His research interests include theories of representation with a focus

on syllabic structure and elements, phonological patterning involving mony, stress and intonation, and the phonetics of English and Japanese in

har-an EFL context

Marc van Oostendorp is Senior Researcher at the Department of

Varia-tionist Linguistics at the Meertens Institute of the Royal Netherlands emy of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Phonological Microvariation at the University of Leiden He holds an MA in Computational Linguistics and a PhD from Tilburg University He is co-editor (with Colin J Ewen,

Acad-Elizabeth V Hume and Keren Rice) of The Blackwell Companion to

Pho-nology (Wiley-Blackwell 2011)

Henk van Riemsdijk was, until recently, Professor of Linguistics and head

of the Models of Grammar Group at Tilburg University, The Netherlands

He is now emeritus and a free-lance linguist operating from his home in Arezzo, Italy He is the co-founder of GLOW, the major professional organization of generative linguists in Europe He was (from 2001 through 2013) the co-editor of the Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics (Springer) and of the book series Studies in Generative Grammar, Mouton

de Gruyter (from 1978 through 2013) And he co-edits the Blackwell

Comprehensive Grammar Resources series (Amsterdam University Press)

He has written and edited around 25 books, contributed around 100 articles and directed around 30 Ph.D Dissertations

Bridget Samuels is Senior Editor for the Center of Craniofacial Molecular

Biology at the University of Southern California She is the author of the

2011 Oxford University Press monograph, Phonological Architecture: A

Biolinguistic Perspective Previously, she held positions at the California

Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland, College Park She received her Ph.D in Linguistics from Harvard University in 2009

Toyomi Takahashi is Professor of English at Toyo University, Tokyo,

Japan His research interests include theories of representation with a focus

on syllabic structure and elements, phonological patterning involving mony, stress and intonation, and the phonetics of English and Japanese in

har-an EFL context

Moira Yip did her BA at Cambridge University, then earned her PhD at

MIT in 1980 She taught at Brandeis University, and the University of

Cali-fornia, Irvine She returned to the UK in 1998, and taught at University

College London (UCL) until her retirement in 2008 She is now Emeritus

Professor of Linguistics at UCL She has published two books on tone, and

many articles on a wide range of topics in phonological theory, including

many on identity and non-identity phenomena She has a particular interest

in Chinese, and more recently has published on comparisons between

bird-song and human language

a bearing on the role that identity plays in the structure of grammatical resentations and principles

rep-Needless to say, the notion of identity as used here is an intuitive notion,

a pre-theoretical one We do not really know that we are talking about thesame thing when we talk about referential identity and haplology, even though both are discussed in terms of some notion of identity Bringing together a variety of studies involving some notion of identity will un-doubtedly bring us closer to an understanding of the similarities and differ-ences among the various uses of the notion of identity in grammar Ulti-mately, many of the phenomena and analyses discussed in this book should probably be evaluated against the background of Type Identity Theory to see if a more precise notion of identity can emerge

Some ways in which identity-sensitivity manifests itself are fairly straightforward For example, reduplication (cf Raimy 2000 and many others) in morpho-phonology creates sequences of identical syllables or morphemes Similarly, copying constructions in syntax create an identical copy of a word or phrase in some distant position This is typically true, for example, of verb topicalizations such as those frequently found in African languages such as Vata (cf Koopman 1984) In such constructions (often referred to as ‘predicate clefts’) the verb is fronted, but is again pronounced

in its source position, (cf Kandybowicz 2006 and references cited there) Such constructions as well as the observation that wh-copy constructions are frequently found in child language (see for example McDaniel, Chiu and Maxfield 1995), have also contributed to the so-called copy theory of movement according to which a chain of identical copies is created whose

Kuniya Nasukawa and Henk van Riemsdijk

1 Introduction

Few concepts are as ubiquitous in the physical world of humans as that of identity Laws of nature crucially involve relations of identity and non-identity, the act of identifying is central to most cognitive processes, and the structure of human language is determined in many different ways by considerations of identity and its opposite The purpose of this book is to bring together research from a broad scale of domains of grammar that have

a bearing on the role that identity plays in the structure of grammatical resentations and principles

rep-Needless to say, the notion of identity as used here is an intuitive notion,

a pre-theoretical one We do not really know that we are talking about thesame thing when we talk about referential identity and haplology, even though both are discussed in terms of some notion of identity Bringing together a variety of studies involving some notion of identity will un-doubtedly bring us closer to an understanding of the similarities and differ-ences among the various uses of the notion of identity in grammar Ulti-mately, many of the phenomena and analyses discussed in this book should probably be evaluated against the background of Type Identity Theory to see if a more precise notion of identity can emerge

Some ways in which identity-sensitivity manifests itself are fairly straightforward For example, reduplication (cf Raimy 2000 and many others) in morpho-phonology creates sequences of identical syllables or morphemes Similarly, copying constructions in syntax create an identical copy of a word or phrase in some distant position This is typically true, for example, of verb topicalizations such as those frequently found in African languages such as Vata (cf Koopman 1984) In such constructions (often referred to as ‘predicate clefts’) the verb is fronted, but is again pronounced

in its source position, (cf Kandybowicz 2006 and references cited there) Such constructions as well as the observation that wh-copy constructions are frequently found in child language (see for example McDaniel, Chiu and Maxfield 1995), have also contributed to the so-called copy theory of movement according to which a chain of identical copies is created whose

(non-)pronunciation is determined by principles of spell-out Alternate

the-ories of movement such as remerge resulting in multiple dominance largely

avoid the identity problem, see Gärtner (2002), who observes that the

cop-ies under the copy theory are not formally identical at all

In many cases, however, what is at stake is not the coexistence of

identi-cal elements in grammatiidenti-cal structure but rather its opposite, the avoidance

of identity, a term due to Yip (1998) Haplology, the deletion of one of two

identical syllables or morphemes, is a case in point In addition to deletion,

there are other ways to avoid sequences of two identical elements (“XX”):

creating distance (XX→X…X) or fusion (AA→Ā) In phonology and

morphology, there is an abundance of identity avoidance phenomena, and

some major principles such as the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP, cf

McCarthy 1986) are instrumental in accounting for them But OCP-like

principles have also been argued to be operative in syntax (cf Van

Riemsdijk 2008 and references cited there)

In semantics, an identity avoidance effect that immediately comes to

mind is Principle C of the Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981): a referential

expression can never be bound, that is, c-commanded, by an element

bear-ing an identical index Principle C may thus be interpreted as a principle

that avoids identity in some way Still, while referential identity is clearly a

necessary condition in order for Principle C to kick in, why does it apply in

some cases but not in others? For example, why does contrastive focus

override Principle C? And why does Principle C treat epithets more like

pronouns than like full copies of the other noun phrase? Given elements

must be either deaccented or deleted/silent (cf Williams 1997), which

sug-gests an identity avoidance effect But then, how does the notion of

‘givenness’, to the extent that we understand it, relate to the notion of

iden-tity? Does the fact that we may be talking about pragmatics here rather than

semantics play a role in our assessment of apparent identity relations of this

kind?

In the examples alluded to above, questions immediately arise as to

what exactly we mean by identity And when we think about these issues a

bit more, things are indeed far from obvious It suffices to look at

distinc-tive features in phonology /i/ and /u/ are identical in that both are vowels,

but they are different in that one is a front vowel and the other a back vowel

What counts for the calculus of identity, full feature matrices or subsets of

features, and if the latter, which subsets? Take a difficult problem from

syntax The so called “Doubly Filled Comp Filter” (DFC, cf Chomsky and

Lasnik 1977 and much subsequent research) ostensibly excludes two

posi-tions that are close to one another (the complementizer head and its

specifi-er position) if both are phonetically realized Typically, the complementizspecifi-er

is an element such as that, while the specifier contains some wh-phrase, i.e

a DP, a PP, an AP or a CP, excluding such cases as *I wonder who that you

saw? Note however that many languages have a process whereby a finite

verb is moved into the complementizer position, such as Subject Auxiliary Inversion in English But whenever this happens, the DFC does not apply: who did you see? Could the relative identity between a wh-phrase and a

“nominal” complementizer such as that as opposed to the relative identity between the wh-phrase and a finite verb be responsible? Clearly, identity is a very abstract and perhaps not even a coherent concept, and invoking it is never a trivial matter

non-Similar issues arise in the domain of intervention constraints

Minimali-ty, and in particular, Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 1990), involves the relative identity of the intervening element with the element that crosses it But again, what are the relevant properties? In Rizzi’s book, it is proposed that the crucial property is A vs Ā But there are many indications that what counts as an intervener is tied to “lower” level features In Dutch, for example, the [+R] feature creates an intervention effect (cf Van Riemsdijk1978) but the [+wh] feature does not

Beyond a great many analytical puzzles, the creation and avoidance of identity in grammar raise lots of fundamental and taxing questions These include:

• Why is identity sometimes tolerated or even necessary, while in other contexts it must be avoided?

• What are the properties of complex elements that contribute to configurations of identity (XX)?

• What structural notions of closeness or distance determine whether

an offending XX-relation exists or, inversely, whether two more or less distant elements satisfy some requirement of identity?

• Is it possible to generalize over the specific principles that govern (non-)identity in the various components of grammar, or are such comparisons merely metaphorical?

• Indeed, can we define the notion of ‘identity’ in a formal way that will allow us to decide which of the manifold phenomena that we can think of are genuine instances of some identity (avoidance) effect?

• If identity avoidance is a manifestation in grammar of some much more encompassing principle, some law of nature, then how is it possible that what does and what does not count as identical in the

tions that are close to one another (the complementizer head and its

specifi-er position) if both are phonetically realized Typically, the complementizspecifi-er

is an element such as that, while the specifier contains some wh-phrase, i.e

a DP, a PP, an AP or a CP, excluding such cases as *I wonder who that you

saw? Note however that many languages have a process whereby a finite

verb is moved into the complementizer position, such as Subject Auxiliary Inversion in English But whenever this happens, the DFC does not apply: who did you see? Could the relative identity between a wh-phrase and a

“nominal” complementizer such as that as opposed to the relative identity between the wh-phrase and a finite verb be responsible? Clearly, identity is a very abstract and perhaps not even a coherent concept, and invoking it is never a trivial matter

non-Similar issues arise in the domain of intervention constraints

Minimali-ty, and in particular, Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 1990), involves the relative identity of the intervening element with the element that crosses it But again, what are the relevant properties? In Rizzi’s book, it is proposed that the crucial property is A vs Ā But there are many indications that what counts as an intervener is tied to “lower” level features In Dutch, for example, the [+R] feature creates an intervention effect (cf Van Riemsdijk1978) but the [+wh] feature does not

Beyond a great many analytical puzzles, the creation and avoidance of identity in grammar raise lots of fundamental and taxing questions These include:

• Why is identity sometimes tolerated or even necessary, while in other contexts it must be avoided?

• What are the properties of complex elements that contribute to configurations of identity (XX)?

• What structural notions of closeness or distance determine whether

an offending XX-relation exists or, inversely, whether two more or less distant elements satisfy some requirement of identity?

• Is it possible to generalize over the specific principles that govern (non-)identity in the various components of grammar, or are such comparisons merely metaphorical?

• Indeed, can we define the notion of ‘identity’ in a formal way that will allow us to decide which of the manifold phenomena that we can think of are genuine instances of some identity (avoidance) effect?

• If identity avoidance is a manifestation in grammar of some much more encompassing principle, some law of nature, then how is it possible that what does and what does not count as identical in the

grammars of different languages seems to be subject to considerable

variation?

The present collection of articles addresses only some aspects of such

questions, but we hope it will pave the way for more extensive attention to

the role of (non-)identity in linguistics and neighboring as well as

superor-dinate disciplines The idea for this book finds its origin in the workshop

entitled “Identity in Grammar” held in conjunction with the 2011 GLOW

Martin Prinzhorn, Henk van Riemsdijk and Viola Schmitt The contribution

of Martin Prinzhorn and Viola Schmitt, which extends to some of the

pas-sages of the topic description that are incorporated in some form or other in

the present introduction, is gratefully acknowledged The articles in this

collection are arranged under four categories: phonology (Part I),

morpho-syntax (Part II), morpho-syntax (Part III) and general (Part IV) Four of the articles,

those by Artemis Alexiadou, Maria Rita Manzini, Kuniya Nasukawa and

Phillip Backley, and Moira Yip, were presented at the Vienna workshop

And because these papers succeed in illustrating the overall theme of the

volume, they appear first in their respective category The remaining

arti-cles were submitted in response to an invitation by the editors Abstracts of

all the articles are given below

Phonology

Kuniya Nasukawa and Phillip Backley observe that identity avoidance

constraints such as OCP do not usually refer to phonological domains

smaller than the segment This is based on their claim that allowing two

identical features to be adjacent leads to redundancy They also argue that

in other domains of phonology and morphology identity avoidance is

driv-en by a gdriv-eneral principle of contrastivdriv-eness which subsumes constraints

prosodic levels is attributed to the way some properties are bound by

pro-sodic domains: those tied to the edges of domains (e.g aspiration,

glottal-isation, prenasality, true voicing) adhere to identity avoidance whereas

place properties tend to display harmonic behavior instead These two

pat-terns reflect the division between non-resonance features (prosodic

mark-ers) and resonance features (segmental markmark-ers) This approach is

altogeth-1

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Truus und Gerrit

van Riemsdijk Stiftung, Vaduz, which made the workshop possible

er simpler than Feature Geometry proposals involving three or more feature divisions

Marc van Oostendorp presents an analysis of rhyme in terms of

mul-tidominance, arguing that rhyming words share some part of their logical representation It is shown how this analysis differs from two other formal phonological approaches to rhyme, one developed within Corre-spondence Theory and the other within Loop Theory Van Oostendorp also demonstrates how his analysis can account for imperfect rhymes and for the fact that the onsets of rhyming syllables (or feet) have to be different — in other words, that the world’s languages display a strong tendency to avoid complete identity when it comes to rhyming systems He concludes with a short case study of a rhyming style that ignores voiceless coronal obstru-ents

phono-Patrik Bye examines a database of 1556 English CV(V)C

monosylla-bles and shows that identical transvocalic consonants at non-apical places

of articulation are overrepresented relative to their homorganic class and strongly overrepresented once gradient similarity avoidance is factored in His proposed explanation connects this pattern to repetitive babbling in infancy, which lays down connections in memory between non-apical plac-

es of articulation and motor repetition Apical consonants are not mastered until long after the babbling phase, and are therefore subject to similarity avoidance

Toyomi Takahashi focuses on identity avoidance within the syllable

onset In general, complex onsets (two or more timing slots or root nodes) disallow partial or full geminates, unlike other phonotactic domains such as complex nuclei or coda-onset sequences Revisiting Kahn’s ideas (1976) concerning the constrained nature of non-linear representation, Takahashi claims that well-formedness in representations should be ensured in such away that the expressive capacity of representations naturally excludes unat-tested (and thus, redundant) structures without recourse to extrinsic well-formedness constraints From this ‘redundancy-free’ perspective, he argues that the onset is unary at all levels of representation Apparent ‘clusters’ or

‘contours’ within the onset are claimed to result from the phonetic tation of phonologically unordered melodic properties, in much the same way that plosives show three distinct phases that are not phonologically encoded

interpre-er simplinterpre-er than Feature Geometry proposals involving three or more feature divisions.

Marc van Oostendorp presents an analysis of rhyme in terms of

mul-tidominance, arguing that rhyming words share some part of their logical representation It is shown how this analysis differs from two other formal phonological approaches to rhyme, one developed within Corre-spondence Theory and the other within Loop Theory Van Oostendorp also demonstrates how his analysis can account for imperfect rhymes and for the fact that the onsets of rhyming syllables (or feet) have to be different — in other words, that the world’s languages display a strong tendency to avoid complete identity when it comes to rhyming systems He concludes with a short case study of a rhyming style that ignores voiceless coronal obstru-ents

phono-Patrik Bye examines a database of 1556 English CV(V)C

monosylla-bles and shows that identical transvocalic consonants at non-apical places

of articulation are overrepresented relative to their homorganic class and strongly overrepresented once gradient similarity avoidance is factored in His proposed explanation connects this pattern to repetitive babbling in infancy, which lays down connections in memory between non-apical plac-

es of articulation and motor repetition Apical consonants are not mastered until long after the babbling phase, and are therefore subject to similarity avoidance

Toyomi Takahashi focuses on identity avoidance within the syllable

onset In general, complex onsets (two or more timing slots or root nodes) disallow partial or full geminates, unlike other phonotactic domains such as complex nuclei or coda-onset sequences Revisiting Kahn’s ideas (1976) concerning the constrained nature of non-linear representation, Takahashi claims that well-formedness in representations should be ensured in such away that the expressive capacity of representations naturally excludes unat-tested (and thus, redundant) structures without recourse to extrinsic well-formedness constraints From this ‘redundancy-free’ perspective, he argues that the onset is unary at all levels of representation Apparent ‘clusters’ or

‘contours’ within the onset are claimed to result from the phonetic tation of phonologically unordered melodic properties, in much the same way that plosives show three distinct phases that are not phonologically encoded

Maria Rita Manzini investigates three constructions which feature in a

variety of Romance languages and which involve identity avoidance in one

form or another Specifically, she offers a detailed discussion of (i) double

-l, as found in clitic clusters, (ii) negative imperatives, and (iii) negative

concord (or double -n) Manzini demonstrates that, while these

construc-tions apparently belong to three different domains of grammar (morphology,

syntax and semantics, respectively), they all produce a mutual exclusion

effect that manifests itself in very local domains In other words, all three

appear to involve a kind of identity avoidance

Peter Ackema investigates a number of agreement phenomena in Dutch,

some of which are partly morpho-phonological and partly morpho-syntactic

in nature He shows that there are instances of agreement weakening which

apply to syntactic agreement but not to semantic agreement, and argues that

syntactic agreement weakening should be viewed as an instance of identity

avoidance Furthermore, Ackema traces the difference in behavior between

syntactic and semantic agreement to a difference in the internal structure of

strong and weak pronouns: strong pronouns have a richer internal structure

than weak pronouns, which explains why the latter are more likely to be

identical with their antecedents and thus susceptible to agreement

weaken-ing

Syntax

Artemis Alexiadou distinguishes two types of proposals that aim to

ac-count for “bans on multiple objects,” viz the Subject in situ Generalization

and Distinctness She argues that, while both may be viewed as specific

instantiations of identity avoidance, each is independently motivated

Fur-thermore, Alexiadou suggests that both principles are also different from

other identity avoidance effects that have been observed in the literature

Alexiadou therefore offers a caution to the linguistic community against

any hasty attempts to unify what may appear to be similar instances of

identity avoidance but which, under closer scrutiny, reveal crucial

differ-ences

Ken Hiraiwa addresses three cases of morpho-syntactic identity

avoid-ance in Japanese: a double genitive constraint (*-no -no), a double

conjunc-tive coordinator constraint (*-to -to), and a double disjuncconjunc-tive coordinator

constraint (*-ka -ka) He goes on to argue that the structural conditions

under which these three constraints may apply, or are blocked from

apply-ing, are sufficiently similar to justify an attempt to unify all three To sure the success of such a move, however, two types of adjacency must be

Kyle Johnson presents a detailed investigation of so-called Andrews

amalgams such as Sally will eat I don’t know what today As in other

con-structions containing grafts or amalgams, an important observation is that two sentence-like structures are somehow fused together into a single com-plex sentence, and the place where the two structures are connected is a

shared element, what in the above example Johnson argues that there are

two types of identity involved in such structures First, he proposes that Andrews amalgams are instances of multiple dominance, in that the shared element is dominated by two separate nodes, one in each substructure Sec-ond, he shows that the construction involves sluicing, an ellipsis construc-tion that can only function under a precise notion of antecedence, which is governed by recoverability, essentially identity

Roger Wei-wen Liao suggests that the notions of symmetry breaking

and identity avoidance should be assimilated to one another Basing his argument partly on unpublished work by Jean-Roger Vergnaud, he devel-ops a three-dimensional theory of phrase structure designed to accommo-date complex phrases in which, in addition to the lexical head and the func-tional heads in its shell(s), there are also classifiers or semi-lexical heads A

typical example is many bottles of wine, arguably a single extended

projec-tion The structures Liao proposes are fully symmetrical, but in order to be expressible the symmetry must be broken up In other words, the idea is that narrow syntax is highly symmetrical, but that linguistic computation is driven by the need to break up the symmetry

General

Moira Yip explores the boundaries between grammar proper and

cogni-tion in general She shows that identity sensitivity is found not only in many different modalities of human behavior but also in many different species For example, studies have shown that in birdsong both the identity and the non-identity of the song in question can be an important carrier of information It is not surprising, therefore, that many identity and non-identity effects are found in the grammars of natural languages

2

It would appear that the distinction has a wider use, as a similar distinction is shown to play a role in the licensing of silent motion verbs in Swiss German, cf Van Riemsdijk (2002)

ing, are sufficiently similar to justify an attempt to unify all three To sure the success of such a move, however, two types of adjacency must be

Kyle Johnson presents a detailed investigation of so-called Andrews

amalgams such as Sally will eat I don’t know what today As in other

con-structions containing grafts or amalgams, an important observation is that two sentence-like structures are somehow fused together into a single com-plex sentence, and the place where the two structures are connected is a

shared element, what in the above example Johnson argues that there are

two types of identity involved in such structures First, he proposes that Andrews amalgams are instances of multiple dominance, in that the shared element is dominated by two separate nodes, one in each substructure Sec-ond, he shows that the construction involves sluicing, an ellipsis construc-tion that can only function under a precise notion of antecedence, which is governed by recoverability, essentially identity

Roger Wei-wen Liao suggests that the notions of symmetry breaking

and identity avoidance should be assimilated to one another Basing his argument partly on unpublished work by Jean-Roger Vergnaud, he devel-ops a three-dimensional theory of phrase structure designed to accommo-date complex phrases in which, in addition to the lexical head and the func-tional heads in its shell(s), there are also classifiers or semi-lexical heads A

typical example is many bottles of wine, arguably a single extended

projec-tion The structures Liao proposes are fully symmetrical, but in order to be expressible the symmetry must be broken up In other words, the idea is that narrow syntax is highly symmetrical, but that linguistic computation is driven by the need to break up the symmetry

General

Moira Yip explores the boundaries between grammar proper and

cogni-tion in general She shows that identity sensitivity is found not only in many different modalities of human behavior but also in many different species For example, studies have shown that in birdsong both the identity and the non-identity of the song in question can be an important carrier of information It is not surprising, therefore, that many identity and non-identity effects are found in the grammars of natural languages

2

It would appear that the distinction has a wider use, as a similar distinction is shown to play a role in the licensing of silent motion verbs in Swiss German, cf Van Riemsdijk (2002)

Clearly, a volume of this size cannot do justice to a topic as broad as

that of identity in the structure of grammatical representations and

princi-ples Nevertheless, we hope that these articles will convey something of the

scope and influence that the notion of identity appears to have on a range of

apparently unrelated phenomena observed in a variety of different

lan-guages

Bridget Samuels is also concerned with the question of whether

identi-ty avoidance (*XX) and symmetry breaking (as in dynamic antisymmetry)

can be understood as two sides of the same coin She approaches this

ques-tion from a broad biolinguistic perspective Anti-identity can be created in

various ways in grammar — for example, by category formation, by

inter-nal (copy-)merge — but the resulting structures are disfavored due to a

variety of factors including perceptual difficulty and articulatory fatigue

However, Samuels also shows that the evolutionary origins of these effects

are not unitary, concluding that we are only at the very beginning of the

serious study of “third factor” principles of biological design such as

identi-ty creation and avoidance

This work was partially funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture,

Sports, Science and Technology of the Japanese government under grant

number 22320090 (awarded to Kuniya Nasukawa)

Kuniya Nasukawa and Henk van Riemsdijk

Sendai and Arezzo, March 2014

References

Chomsky, Noam

1981 Lectures on Government and Binding Dordrecht: Foris

Publica-tions

Chomsky, Noam, and Howard Lasnik

1977 Filters and control Linguistic Inquiry 8: 425–504.

Gärtner, Hans-Martin

2002 Generalized Transformations and Beyond Berlin: Akademie

Verlag

Kahn, Daniel

1976 Syllable-based generalizations in English phonology Ph.D

dis-sertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Kandybowicz, Jason

2006 Conditions on multiple spell-out and the syntax-phonology

inter-face Ph.D dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.Koopman, Hilda

1984 The Syntax of Verbs Dordrecht: Foris Publications.

McCarthy, John

1986 OCP effects: gemination and anti-gemination Linguistic Inquiry

17: 207–263

McDaniel, Dana, Bonnie Chiu, and Thomas Maxfield

1995 Parameters for wh-movement types: evidence from child

lan-guage Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 13: 709–754.

Raimy, Eric

2000 The Phonology and Morphology of Reduplication Berlin/New

York: Mouton de Gruyter

Riemsdijk, Henk C van

1978 A Case Study in Syntactic Markedness: The Binding Nature of

Prepositional Phrases Lisse: The Peter de Ridder Press, later

published by Foris Publications Dordrecht and currently by Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York

2002 The unbearable lightness of GOing The Journal of Comparative

Germanic Linguistics 5: 143–196.

2008 Identity avoidance: OCP-effects in Swiss relatives In

Founda-tional Issues in Linguistic Theory: Essays in Honor of Roger Vergnaud, Robert Freidin, Carlos P Otero and Maria

Jean-Luisa Zubizarreta (eds.), 227–250 Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Rizzi, Luigi

1990 Relativized Minimality Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Williams, Edwin

1997 Blocking and anaphora Linguistic Inquiry 28: 577–628.

Yip, Moira

1998 Identity avoidance in phonology and morphology In

Morpholo-gy and Its Relation to PhonoloMorpholo-gy and Syntax, Stephen G

Lapointe, Diane K Brentari and Patrick M Farrell (eds.), 216–

246 Stanford, CA: CSLI

Kandybowicz, Jason

2006 Conditions on multiple spell-out and the syntax-phonology

inter-face Ph.D dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.Koopman, Hilda

1984 The Syntax of Verbs Dordrecht: Foris Publications.

McCarthy, John

1986 OCP effects: gemination and anti-gemination Linguistic Inquiry

17: 207–263

McDaniel, Dana, Bonnie Chiu, and Thomas Maxfield

1995 Parameters for wh-movement types: evidence from child

lan-guage Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 13: 709–754.

Raimy, Eric

2000 The Phonology and Morphology of Reduplication Berlin/New

York: Mouton de Gruyter

Riemsdijk, Henk C van

1978 A Case Study in Syntactic Markedness: The Binding Nature of

Prepositional Phrases Lisse: The Peter de Ridder Press, later

published by Foris Publications Dordrecht and currently by Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York

2002 The unbearable lightness of GOing The Journal of Comparative

Germanic Linguistics 5: 143–196.

2008 Identity avoidance: OCP-effects in Swiss relatives In

Founda-tional Issues in Linguistic Theory: Essays in Honor of Roger Vergnaud, Robert Freidin, Carlos P Otero and Maria

Jean-Luisa Zubizarreta (eds.), 227–250 Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Rizzi, Luigi

1990 Relativized Minimality Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Williams, Edwin

1997 Blocking and anaphora Linguistic Inquiry 28: 577–628.

Yip, Moira

1998 Identity avoidance in phonology and morphology In

Morpholo-gy and Its Relation to PhonoloMorpholo-gy and Syntax, Stephen G

Lapointe, Diane K Brentari and Patrick M Farrell (eds.), 216–

246 Stanford, CA: CSLI

Part I Phonology

Kuniya Nasukawa and Phillip Backley

1 Introduction

Language succeeds as a system of communication by exploiting the damental notion of contrastiveness Broadly speaking, the information as-sociated with a structural object such as a segment, morpheme, or phrase can only perform a linguistic function if it is distinguishable from other structural objects around it When applied to phonology, this premise can have the effect of preventing identical units (e.g features, segments, organ-ising nodes) from appearing next to each other The idea is therefore that languages strive towards identity avoidance (Yip 1998), which is usually formalized as the Obligatory Contour Principle or OCP (Leben 1973, Gold-smith 1976, McCarthy 1986, Yip 1988) The OCP has become established

fun-as a key structural principle in both phonology and morphology, and is typically expressed as in (1)

Adjacent identical objects are prohibited

The OCP operates as a meta-principle or meta-constraint (Yip 1998, Van Riemsdijk 2008), taking different arguments as required; these include stem, affix, foot, syllable, (C/V) position and node, as well as individual phono-logical features Its role is to eliminate illicit sequences of identical objects, which it does by triggering various OCP effects including deletion and dissimilation In tone languages, for example, the OCP is thought to be responsible for the absence of adjacent identical tones in lexical forms It also repairs such sequences when they are produced as a result of morpho-logical concatenation; for example, the ill-formed tone pattern *H-HL may

be repaired as HL in order to avoid an illicit *H-H sequence

The OCP may also block a segmental property from appearing more than once in a domain, where the property in question is represented by a particular feature In Japanese, for instance, the feature [voice], which rep-resents obstruent voicing, can occur only once in a native word/morpheme,

making geta [ɡeta] ‘clogs’ and kaze [kaze] ‘wind’ well-formed but *[ɡeda],

*[ɡaze], etc impossible OCP restrictions may refer to domains other than

the word too For example, English and Thai allow the feature [spread

glot-tis] (or [tense]), which is responsible for aspiration, to appear just once in a

]) Other cases of tal OCP restrictions abound In Arabic, for instance, two [labial] consonants

segmen-cannot belong to the same root, hence fqh ‘understand’, klm ‘speak’ are

well-formed whereas *btf, *flm etc are not What these examples illustrate

is that, although the OCP controls the distribution of segmental properties,

it does so by referring to prosodic or morphological domains

Without doubt, the OCP provides a convenient way of capturing certain

distributional patterns Moreover, it is used consistently by scholars of

dif-fering theoretical persuasions who in other respects may not share much

common ground But on the other hand, the OCP’s usefulness is limited by

the fact that its function is descriptive — when expressed as in (1), it cannot

explain why two identical tokens of a particular object may not stand next

to each other Several suggestions have been made to account for the

exist-ence of dissimilation effects triggered by the OCP According to

Coarticu-lation-Hypercorrection Theory (Ohala 1981, 1993, 2003), these effects

come about when listeners reverse a perceived coarticulation From this it

follows that dissimilation should only occur with features that are

associat-ed with elongatassociat-ed phonetic cues that extend continuously beyond the scope

of a single segment Another view holds that they arise from the difficulties

that listeners face when they have to process language which contains

simi-lar segments in close proximity (Frisch, Pierrehumbert and Broe 2004) In

this case, the OCP may be said to be functionally motivated because, in

some languages at least, it is driven by statistical factors emerging from the

structure of the lexicon Van de Weijer (2012) also notes the relevance of

statistics to our understanding of the nature of the OCP Citing

Boll-Avetisyan and Kager (2004), he suggests that in the grammar of the infant

language learner the OCP may emerge as a learned constraint — rather than

being present from the outset as innate knowledge — on the grounds that

OCP effects are prevalent in adult language and therefore have a significant

influence on the shape of the child’s early lexical forms

On the face of it, these suggestions appear to offer valid ways of

moti-vating the OCP But on the other hand, they are based primarily on aspects

of language that are external to the grammar, such as language learning and

processing To gain a fuller understanding of the OCP as a principle of

grammaticality and its effect on phonological representations, we should

ideally like to identify something within the grammar that can account for

the pervasiveness of OCP-related effects cross-linguistically In this paper

it will be argued that the explanation lies in segmental structure — more specifically, in segmental structure as represented by elements rather than traditional features The discussion will show how the element structure of segments offers a useful insight into why certain OCP effects take place

2 The OCP and prosodic domains

It is interesting to note that structural units smaller than the segment do not make reference to the OCP In other words, identity avoidance is apparently not an issue when it comes to describing segment-internal structure This makes the OCP irrelevant to models of segmental representation such as dependency phonology and feature geometry, where it is taken for granted

this seems a reasonable approach to take, as there are no reported cases of OCP effects at this level of structure But in another sense it has the appear-ance of a stipulation — our instinct is to seek an explanation for why mul-tiple tokens of a given melodic unit such as a feature or an organising node are generally not possible in a single segment Below we show that such an explanation can be found if we are willing to admit that segmental structure

is represented using elements rather than features That is, by adopting an element-based approach we can begin to understand why OCP effects are never observed at the sub-segmental level The claim that element-based representations rule out OCP effects will be expanded in §4 and §5 This is preceded in §3 by a brief introduction to the Element Theory approach We

begin, however, by considering the contexts where OCP effects do take

place

In short, the OCP can apply wherever we get phonological contrasts This will often be between adjacent segments, but it may also be between non-adjacent segments belonging to the same prosodic domain (e.g sylla-ble, foot) or the same morphological domain (e.g root, word) In the case

of OCP effects operating in these wider domains, it is possible for the

ef-fects themselves to be motivated not by the notion of contrast per se, but

rather, by the more general notion of information The role of segmental properties — as represented by units such as features or elements — is to carry linguistic information which contributes to the identity of individual

1

A reviewer has pointed out that some dependency-based models (e.g Van

de Weijer 1996) and particle-based models (Schane 1984) do permit conjunction in representations, making structures such as |I I| well-formed

self-it will be argued that the explanation lies in segmental structure — more specifically, in segmental structure as represented by elements rather than traditional features The discussion will show how the element structure of segments offers a useful insight into why certain OCP effects take place.

2 The OCP and prosodic domains

It is interesting to note that structural units smaller than the segment do not make reference to the OCP In other words, identity avoidance is apparently not an issue when it comes to describing segment-internal structure This makes the OCP irrelevant to models of segmental representation such as dependency phonology and feature geometry, where it is taken for granted

this seems a reasonable approach to take, as there are no reported cases of OCP effects at this level of structure But in another sense it has the appear-ance of a stipulation — our instinct is to seek an explanation for why mul-tiple tokens of a given melodic unit such as a feature or an organising node are generally not possible in a single segment Below we show that such an explanation can be found if we are willing to admit that segmental structure

is represented using elements rather than features That is, by adopting an element-based approach we can begin to understand why OCP effects are never observed at the sub-segmental level The claim that element-based representations rule out OCP effects will be expanded in §4 and §5 This is preceded in §3 by a brief introduction to the Element Theory approach We

begin, however, by considering the contexts where OCP effects do take

place

In short, the OCP can apply wherever we get phonological contrasts This will often be between adjacent segments, but it may also be between non-adjacent segments belonging to the same prosodic domain (e.g sylla-ble, foot) or the same morphological domain (e.g root, word) In the case

of OCP effects operating in these wider domains, it is possible for the

ef-fects themselves to be motivated not by the notion of contrast per se, but

rather, by the more general notion of information The role of segmental properties — as represented by units such as features or elements — is to carry linguistic information which contributes to the identity of individual

1

A reviewer has pointed out that some dependency-based models (e.g Van

de Weijer 1996) and particle-based models (Schane 1984) do permit conjunction in representations, making structures such as |I I| well-formed

self-segments; and typically, this information relates to lexical contrasts But

importantly, this is not the only kind of information that segmental

struc-ture can express: it may also encode linguistic information relating to

pro-sodic or morphological domains, and specifically, to the places where

information, and illustrate how certain segmental properties are favoured

cross-linguistically because they convey information about domains When

these properties appear at domain edges they are usually pronounced in full

in order to perform their function of marking out domain boundaries But

on the other hand, when they occur in the middle of a domain the grammar

tends to suppress them, either through lenition processes or through OCP

effects

By studying examples of OCP effects (or identity avoidance) in

differ-ent languages, it becomes possible to establish generalisations concerning

(i) which segmental properties are regularly used to identify the edges of

domains, and (ii) which domains are relevant to the OCP And given that

identity avoidance phenomena are observed at different structural levels,

we show how this reduces to the idea that certain segmental properties are

bound by certain prosodic or morphological domains Returning to the

example of [voice] in native Japanese words, having two segments marked

for [voice] in a single word is, for contrastive purposes, no different from

having just one segment marked for [voice], since [voice] behaves as a

morpheme-level property rather than a segment-level one Beyond Japanese,

the same applies to features that are harmonically active in vowel harmony

systems

To provide the necessary background for a discussion of how OCP

ef-fects relate to segmental structure, the following section introduces the set

of units or ‘elements’ employed in Element Theory It will emerge that

representing segments in terms of elements rather than traditional features

allows the grammar to capture information about structural domains in a

natural and intuitive way

2

Information about the location of prosodic boundaries is now understood to

play a central part in language processing as well as in acquisition — see, for

ex-ample, Jusczyk, Cutler and Redanz (1993)

3 Segmental structure with elements

3.1 The elementsLike feature theory, Element Theory exists in various forms — see, for example, Harris and Lindsey (1995), Nasukawa and Backley (2008, 2011), Backley and Nasukawa (2009a, 2010) The version of Element Theory used here employs the six elements listed in (2) Each one is shown with the informal name for its acoustic pattern (in brackets) together with a descrip-tion of the acoustic properties usually associated with it

element typical acoustic correlates

with F2)

element typical acoustic correlates

|N| (murmur) periodicityInformally, the elements divide into two sets, a vowel set comprising the resonance elements |I|, |U| and |A| and a consonant set comprising the non-resonance elements |Ɂ|, |H| and |N| Note that this is not an absolute split, however: although |I|, |U| and |A| naturally occur in vowels, they regularly

and |N| naturally belong in consonant structures, they may also appear in vowels The distribution of elements is described in more detail below.Element Theory differs from traditional SPE-based feature theories in several ways One of the basic differences is apparent from (2) — namely, that elements are described in terms of acoustic properties rather than artic-ulation, which is the case with features developed in the SPE (Chomsky and Halle 1968) tradition More precisely, elements are associated with specific acoustic patterns in the speech signal, where these patterns encode the linguistic information that language users instinctively pay attention to during communication The patterns in question go by the informal names given in brackets in (2)

3 Segmental structure with elements

3.1 The elements

Like feature theory, Element Theory exists in various forms — see, for example, Harris and Lindsey (1995), Nasukawa and Backley (2008, 2011), Backley and Nasukawa (2009a, 2010) The version of Element Theory used here employs the six elements listed in (2) Each one is shown with the informal name for its acoustic pattern (in brackets) together with a descrip-tion of the acoustic properties usually associated with it

element typical acoustic correlates

with F2)

element typical acoustic correlates

|N| (murmur) periodicity

Informally, the elements divide into two sets, a vowel set comprising the resonance elements |I|, |U| and |A| and a consonant set comprising the non-resonance elements |Ɂ|, |H| and |N| Note that this is not an absolute split, however: although |I|, |U| and |A| naturally occur in vowels, they regularly

and |N| naturally belong in consonant structures, they may also appear in vowels The distribution of elements is described in more detail below.Element Theory differs from traditional SPE-based feature theories in several ways One of the basic differences is apparent from (2) — namely, that elements are described in terms of acoustic properties rather than artic-ulation, which is the case with features developed in the SPE (Chomsky and Halle 1968) tradition More precisely, elements are associated with specific acoustic patterns in the speech signal, where these patterns encode the linguistic information that language users instinctively pay attention to during communication The patterns in question go by the informal names given in brackets in (2)

Another basic difference between elements and features has to do with

phonetic interpretability: unlike features, elements can be pronounced on

their own For example, when the element |I| appears by itself in a nucleus

it is realised as the vowel [i], while in an onset it is pronounced as the glide

[j] In this sense, elements are ‘big’ enough to function as segment-sized

units (although it will be shown that they are also ‘small’ enough to

com-bine with one another within a single segment) And what makes it possible

for a single element to represent a whole segment in this way is the fact that

elements refer to acoustic patterns rather than to properties of articulation

As (2) shows, the |I| element represents an acoustic pattern with a

concen-tration of high-frequency energy, which is created by raising F2 to a point

where it merges with F3 And the usual way for speakers to reproduce this

pattern is to adopt a high front tongue position of the kind required for [i]

vowels (e.g [i y e æ]) Typically — though this ultimately depends on the

characteristics of the vowel or consonant system in question — all other

phonetic properties associated with [i]/[j] are phonologically inert, and for

this reason are not explicitly encoded in segmental structure In this respect,

Element Theory departs from standard feature theory, where individual

features cannot be phonetically realised Most features refer to some aspect

of speech production such as tongue position ([high], [back]…), airflow

([continuant], [lateral]…) or laryngeal state ([tense], [voice]…), but none of

these properties is pronounceable on its own So in a fully specified

repre-sentation, a feature must be supported by a range of other features — that is,

it must belong to a full feature matrix — before it can be interpreted

pho-netically by speakers

Elements and features also differ in their distribution Features tend to

be tied to particular syllabic positions, and are therefore associated with

particular kinds of segments For example, [anterior] is only relevant to

consonants, [high] usually refers to vowels, [spread glottis] describes

ob-struents, and so on By contrast, in Element Theory it is possible, at least in

principle, for any element to appear in any syllabic position So although

the elements in (2) are arranged into two groups, a vowel group and a

con-sonant group, this is neither a formal nor a rigid distinction: the labels

‘vowel element’ and ‘consonant element’ are generalisations — they refer

to the acoustic and phonological characteristics of elements only in their

broadest sense In reality, the so-called vowel elements |I|, |U| and |A|

regu-larly appear in consonants; for instance, when they combine with consonant

elements in an onset or coda they represent consonant place, as shown in

(3a) |A| is the place element in gutturals (e.g pharyngeals, uvulars) and

some types of coronals, while |I| represents palatals and other types of onals (Backley 2011) Meanwhile, |U| specifies both labial place and velar place; in this sense, |U| overlaps with features such as [grave] (Jakobson and Halle 1956), [peripheral] (Rice and Avery 1991) and [dark] (Backley and Nasukawa 2009b)

|N| nasality, obstruent voicing nasality, low tone

of distributional freedom They are primarily associated with non-nuclear positions, where they represent the consonant properties of occlusion, frica-tion and nasality, respectively But they also appear in nuclei, where they are responsible for secondary vowel properties such as laryngealisation, tone and nasalisation, as shown in (3b)

Of course, Element Theory is not unique in assuming that consonants and vowels can be represented by the same units For example, the model

of feature geometry developed in Clements and Hume (1995) proposes the shared features [labial], [coronal] and [dorsal] for encoding vowel place and also consonant place Other features such as [continuant] are not shared, however, as there is no obvious way of linking their associated phonetic properties to both vowel and consonant articulations By contrast, Element Theory is able to fully exploit the use of shared units because the units it employs, namely elements, are based on acoustic patterns rather than on articulation — and importantly, the same acoustic patterns are observed in consonant and vowel segments For instance, the pattern associated with the |I| element can be seen in the spectral profiles of front vowels such as [i

y e æ] and palatal consonants such as [j ʃ ç ɲ], even though front vowels and palatal consonants are not articulated in the same way

So far, the elements have been defined in terms of their phonetic (acoustic) properties But in fact elements are to be understood primarily as

some types of coronals, while |I| represents palatals and other types of onals (Backley 2011) Meanwhile, |U| specifies both labial place and velar place; in this sense, |U| overlaps with features such as [grave] (Jakobson and Halle 1956), [peripheral] (Rice and Avery 1991) and [dark] (Backley and Nasukawa 2009b)

|N| nasality, obstruent voicing nasality, low tone

of distributional freedom They are primarily associated with non-nuclear positions, where they represent the consonant properties of occlusion, frica-tion and nasality, respectively But they also appear in nuclei, where they are responsible for secondary vowel properties such as laryngealisation, tone and nasalisation, as shown in (3b)

Of course, Element Theory is not unique in assuming that consonants and vowels can be represented by the same units For example, the model

of feature geometry developed in Clements and Hume (1995) proposes the shared features [labial], [coronal] and [dorsal] for encoding vowel place and also consonant place Other features such as [continuant] are not shared, however, as there is no obvious way of linking their associated phonetic properties to both vowel and consonant articulations By contrast, Element Theory is able to fully exploit the use of shared units because the units it employs, namely elements, are based on acoustic patterns rather than on articulation — and importantly, the same acoustic patterns are observed in consonant and vowel segments For instance, the pattern associated with the |I| element can be seen in the spectral profiles of front vowels such as [i

y e æ] and palatal consonants such as [j ʃ ç ɲ], even though front vowels and palatal consonants are not articulated in the same way

So far, the elements have been defined in terms of their phonetic (acoustic) properties But in fact elements are to be understood primarily as

cognitive (i.e grammatical) units, since they represent the linguistic

information that is needed to distinguish one morpheme from another (The

acoustic patterns associated with the elements do no more than facilitate a

mapping between these cognitive objects and the physical world.)

Accordingly, it is mainly through phonological evidence that Element

Theory motivates the elements themselves and determines the element

structure of a given segment The claim that the same elements are shared

by consonants and vowels, as noted above, is also supported by

phonological evidence — typically, by identifying patterns of

consonant-vowel interaction These patterns suggest that the relevant consonants and

vowels belong to the same natural class, and thus, have some elements in

common For instance, phonological patterning in Mapila Malayalam

shown in (4a) But if there is a rounded vowel (4b) or a labial consonant

by rounding or labiality elsewhere in the word And because rounded

vowels and labial consonants both act as triggers, we can assume they have

the same triggering property, which is represented by the same element in

their respective structures

Given that the same element can appear in consonants and vowels, it

follows that an element can have more than one phonetic realisation (see

(3) above), since consonants and vowels have quite different phonetic (and

especially, articulatory) properties With |I|, |U| and |A| it is not difficult to

see how their consonantal and vocalic realisations are related But in the

stopness or oral occlusion that characterises oral and nasal stops, while on

addition-al marked properties) And in some languages such as Capanahua, |Ɂ| addition-also appears in nuclei, producing a laryngealised vowel to give a creaky voice effect The phonological relation between oral occlusion in stops and creaky voice in vowels is described in Backley (2011: 122) The remaining consonant elements |H| and |N| also have dual interpretations: in consonants they represent the laryngeal properties of aspiration and obstruent voicing, respectively, while in vowels they represent high and low tone Phonologi-cal evidence for the link between laryngeal properties and tone is discussed

in Backley and Nasukawa (2010)

3.2 Segmental structureThere are two ways in which Element Theory can express lexical contrasts,

as shown in (5)

From (5a) it can be inferred that elements are monovalent or single-valued units — this is another difference between the element-based approach and standard feature theories, where features can have either a plus or a minus value Meanwhile, (5b) describes how elements form head-dependency relations when they co-occur in the same segmental expression The nature

of those relations is described below

Because elements have their own acoustic patterns, each element can be pronounced individually In reality, however, most segments are represented by combinations of elements such as those in (6b), rather than

by single elements Compound expressions (i.e structures containing two

or more elements) have both phonetic and phonological complexity They are phonologically complex in the sense that the segment in question belongs to multiple natural classes; for example, the mid vowel [e],

that they map on to multiple acoustic patterns in the speech signal; for

stopness or oral occlusion that characterises oral and nasal stops, while on

addition-al marked properties) And in some languages such as Capanahua, |Ɂ| addition-also appears in nuclei, producing a laryngealised vowel to give a creaky voice effect The phonological relation between oral occlusion in stops and creaky voice in vowels is described in Backley (2011: 122) The remaining consonant elements |H| and |N| also have dual interpretations: in consonants they represent the laryngeal properties of aspiration and obstruent voicing, respectively, while in vowels they represent high and low tone Phonologi-cal evidence for the link between laryngeal properties and tone is discussed

in Backley and Nasukawa (2010)

3.2 Segmental structure

There are two ways in which Element Theory can express lexical contrasts,

as shown in (5)

From (5a) it can be inferred that elements are monovalent or single-valued units — this is another difference between the element-based approach and standard feature theories, where features can have either a plus or a minus value Meanwhile, (5b) describes how elements form head-dependency relations when they co-occur in the same segmental expression The nature

of those relations is described below

Because elements have their own acoustic patterns, each element can be pronounced individually In reality, however, most segments are represented by combinations of elements such as those in (6b), rather than

by single elements Compound expressions (i.e structures containing two

or more elements) have both phonetic and phonological complexity They are phonologically complex in the sense that the segment in question belongs to multiple natural classes; for example, the mid vowel [e],

that they map on to multiple acoustic patterns in the speech signal; for

(6) structure phonetic realisation(s)

As (6) shows, a compound expression can have more than one phonetic

realisation This is because the elements in a compound may combine in

different proportions The convention is to express these differences via

head-dependency relations For example, [e] and [æ] are both compounds

Consonant elements may also appear in head or dependent form Using

laminal coronal stops as an illustration, (8) shows how the head/dependent

is discussed in Backley and Nasukawa (2009a)

To summarise, contrasts are expressed by the simple presence versus absence of elements, and also by headedness (i.e the headed versus non-headed status of elements in a compound) On this basis, nothing is gained

by allowing a segment to contain more than one token of an element; for example, |I N| carries the same linguistic information as *|I N N|, making the duplication of |N| unnecessary for the purposes of contrast From the point of view of communication too, the structure *|I N N| does not make grammatical sense: the element |N| represents a specific acoustic pattern in the speech signal, and language users cannot produce or perceive two tokens of this pattern at the same time So if two tokens of an element provide the same amount of linguistic information as a single token of that element, then there is no reason for the grammar to allow duplicate elements as a structural possibility In essence, to claim that grammars disallow structures such as *|I N N| is to claim that OCP violations never occur in segmental structure, because two tokens of the same element never

satisfied within a segment

3.3 Prosodic structureThe previous section described elements as the basic units of segmental representation Segmental contrasts are therefore based on element struc-

3

At first sight, Particle Phonology (Schane 2005) seems to contradict this sumption as it allows the A particle to appear more than once in an expression, e.g IAA But in fact, multiple tokens of a particle simply translate into added promi-nence — something which we claim is achieved using headedness instead

is discussed in Backley and Nasukawa (2009a).

To summarise, contrasts are expressed by the simple presence versus absence of elements, and also by headedness (i.e the headed versus non-headed status of elements in a compound) On this basis, nothing is gained

by allowing a segment to contain more than one token of an element; for example, |I N| carries the same linguistic information as *|I N N|, making the duplication of |N| unnecessary for the purposes of contrast From the point of view of communication too, the structure *|I N N| does not make grammatical sense: the element |N| represents a specific acoustic pattern in the speech signal, and language users cannot produce or perceive two tokens of this pattern at the same time So if two tokens of an element provide the same amount of linguistic information as a single token of that element, then there is no reason for the grammar to allow duplicate elements as a structural possibility In essence, to claim that grammars disallow structures such as *|I N N| is to claim that OCP violations never occur in segmental structure, because two tokens of the same element never

satisfied within a segment

as-ture But phonological information is concerned not only with segments —

it also refers to the relations that hold between those segments That is,

phonological information includes information about prosodic structure

Traditionally, segmental structure and prosodic structure are seen as being

different in kind, the first being concerned with properties that determine

the phonetic realisation of segments and the second with properties that

organise segments into grammatical strings Yet on closer inspection it

appears that both are constructed along similar lines Specifically,

segmen-tal structure relates to the criteria in (9), repeated from (5), while prosodic

structure relates to the criteria in (10)

Clearly, prosodic structure involves units (positions) that are different from

those employed in segmental structure (elements) But interestingly, there

is a close parallel in the way these units function in the grammar In both

cases (i) structural differences are encoded by the presence or absence of

the relevant units, and (ii) structure is formed by allowing those units to

combine by forming head-dependency relations

To illustrate the role of head-dependency relations in prosodic structure,

consider the representation in (11)

pi] consists of four positions grouped into

asymmetric relation exists within each CV unit, the C position being pendent on the following V position Head-dependency applies at higher

de-levels of structure too, with the two syllables of puppy combining

asym-metrically to form a foot In (11) the left-hand syllable is the head of the

(trochaic) foot domain, while in other English words (e.g machíne, appéar)

a right-headed (iambic) foot is also possible It is clear that dependency at the foot level underlies English word stress More generally, this example illustrates how (10b) parallels (9b), in that dependency rela-tions are central to the representation of prosodic structure, just as they are

head-to the representation of element-based segmental structure

And although it is not apparent from (11), it is also the case that (10a) parallels (9a), in that prosodic differences and segmental differences can each be expressed as the presence versus the absence of structural units This is obviously true for segmental differences, given that |I A| (= [e]) and

|I| (= [i]), for example, are distinctive But it also applies to prosodic ences, since there are certain prosodic units — namely, dependents — that are optional It may be argued, for instance, that English words such as

differ-apple, open lack a C1 position And because they have no initial onset tion, these words cannot begin phonetically with a consonant Clearly, vowel-initial words are lexically distinct from consonant-initial words.These parallels make it possible to unify prosodic structure and segmen-tal structure as a general category of phonological structure, defined as in (12)

pi] consists of four positions grouped into

asymmetric relation exists within each CV unit, the C position being pendent on the following V position Head-dependency applies at higher

de-levels of structure too, with the two syllables of puppy combining

asym-metrically to form a foot In (11) the left-hand syllable is the head of the

(trochaic) foot domain, while in other English words (e.g machíne, appéar)

a right-headed (iambic) foot is also possible It is clear that dependency at the foot level underlies English word stress More generally, this example illustrates how (10b) parallels (9b), in that dependency rela-tions are central to the representation of prosodic structure, just as they are

head-to the representation of element-based segmental structure

And although it is not apparent from (11), it is also the case that (10a) parallels (9a), in that prosodic differences and segmental differences can each be expressed as the presence versus the absence of structural units This is obviously true for segmental differences, given that |I A| (= [e]) and

|I| (= [i]), for example, are distinctive But it also applies to prosodic ences, since there are certain prosodic units — namely, dependents — that are optional It may be argued, for instance, that English words such as

differ-apple, open lack a C1 position And because they have no initial onset tion, these words cannot begin phonetically with a consonant Clearly, vowel-initial words are lexically distinct from consonant-initial words.These parallels make it possible to unify prosodic structure and segmen-tal structure as a general category of phonological structure, defined as in (12)

posi-(12) Dimensions of phonological structure

Below it will be explained how integrating prosodic and segmental

struc-ture in this way is relevant to the OCP — and specifically, to the claim that

OCP effects, when they do occur, are never observed within

segment-internal structure The following section shows how language users employ

dependency relations between elements (i.e the difference between headed

and non-headed elements) to encode information relating to the location of

prosodic domains In particular, it will be claimed that headed elements

function as boundary markers for prosodic domains In many cases,

there-fore, the absence of a headed element is not the result of an OCP effect;

rather, it is the result of there being no domain boundary to demarcate

4 Prosodic demarcation: the distribution of headed elements

In this version of Element Theory used here it is assumed that linguistic

information of any kind — or in the spirit of (12), phonological structure of

any kind — can only be communicated if it is phonetically realised And

furthermore, this information can only be phonetically realised if it is

ex-pressed in terms of segmental structure — that is, using elements From this

it follows that elements must be capable of encoding information about

prosodic domains in addition to information about segmental contrasts The

remainder of this paper describes how speakers communicate information

about prosodic (and in addition, morphological) structure

Elsewhere we have argued that the acoustic cues associated with

ele-ment headedness are used in many languages to mark out prosodic and

morphological domains (Backley and Nasukawa 2009a) Generally

speak-ing, positions located at the boundaries of a domain — typically those at

the left boundary (and less commonly, at the right boundary) — tend to

favour headed elements; so when listeners perceive a headed element, they

take this as a reliable cue for locating the edge of a domain As the

psycho-linguistics literature confirms (e.g Cutler and Norris 1988), knowing where

domains begin and end can help listeners to process language more

effi-ciently Note that it is a language-specific matter as to which domain will

be identified by headedness; in some languages it is a prosodic domain

such as a syllable, foot or prosodic word, while in others it is a

morphologi-cal domain such as a root, stem or word

In principle, any element may function as a domain marker For instance,

in vowel harmony systems the vowel elements |I| and |U| often assume this role More generally, however, it is the consonant elements |Ɂ|, |H| and |N| which typically function in this way So, when listeners perceive a headed

|Ɂ|, |H| or |N|, they interpret this as indicating the (left) edge of a prosodic or morphological domain Recall from (8) that headed |Ɂ|, |H| and |N| are asso-ciated with quite distinctive acoustic cues, since these elements signal ejec-tive release, aspiration and full obstruent voicing, respectively Stop aspira-tion in English is frequently cited as an example of how a headed |H|element can function as a prosodic marker, since it is tied to the left edge of

repre-sented by the presence of headed |H| (cf non-headed |H| in unaspirated

rele-vant stop occupies a foot-internal position) Aspiration is prosodically ditioned in Swedish too, but in this case the relevant domain is the word; hence, stops are aspirated word-initially and unaspirated elsewhere, as shown in (13)

which generally occur quite freely in non-nuclear positions, whereas

(i) typologically much less common than plain stops and (ii) usually more

In principle, any element may function as a domain marker For instance,

in vowel harmony systems the vowel elements |I| and |U| often assume this role More generally, however, it is the consonant elements |Ɂ|, |H| and |N| which typically function in this way So, when listeners perceive a headed

|Ɂ|, |H| or |N|, they interpret this as indicating the (left) edge of a prosodic or morphological domain Recall from (8) that headed |Ɂ|, |H| and |N| are asso-ciated with quite distinctive acoustic cues, since these elements signal ejec-tive release, aspiration and full obstruent voicing, respectively Stop aspira-tion in English is frequently cited as an example of how a headed |H|element can function as a prosodic marker, since it is tied to the left edge of

repre-sented by the presence of headed |H| (cf non-headed |H| in unaspirated

rele-vant stop occupies a foot-internal position) Aspiration is prosodically ditioned in Swedish too, but in this case the relevant domain is the word; hence, stops are aspirated word-initially and unaspirated elsewhere, as shown in (13)

which generally occur quite freely in non-nuclear positions, whereas

(i) typologically much less common than plain stops and (ii) usually more

restricted in their distribution A well-documented case is that of Korean,

which has a three-way distinction between plain, aspirated and

tense/ejective stops These are represented as in (14a), which uses the labial

series to illustrate the relevant contrasts

In Korean it is the syllable domain which is marked out by headedness:

tense stops with headed |Ɂ| and aspirated stops with headed |H| are

contras-tive in the syllable onset (i.e the left edge of the syllable domain), while in

coda position the three-way stop distinction neutralises to a plain

unre-leased stop, as in (14b) Because [p˺] in (14b) has no prosodic marking

a headed element, so it must be interpreted as a plain stop; it also loses |H|

(representing audible stop release), resulting in non-release And Korean is

not an isolated case; ejectives have a similar distribution in some native

American languages too, including Klamath, Cuzco Quechua, Maidu,

The remaining consonant element |N| can also function as a domain

marker when it is headed, in which case it is phonetically realised as

ob-struent voicing (Recall from (8) that headed |N| is interpreted as full

voic-ing in obstruents while non-headed |N| is interpreted as nasality in

sonor-ants.) This is observed in some dialects of Japanese, including the variety

spoken in the Northern Tohoku region (Nasukawa 2005), where the

rele-4A reviewer has suggested that the lack of headed |Ɂ|/|H| in neutralised stops

may help listeners identify the syllable domain ‘recessively’ by contributing to the

syntagmatic difference between onset and coda consonants

5Although strong properties such as headed |Ɂ| and |H| typically occur at the

left edge of a domain, there are also languages in which the right boundary of a

domain is demarcated instead We thank a reviewer for pointing out that some

English dialects have ejective release (i.e they contain headed |Ɂ|) exclusively in

word-final position See also the case of Kaqchikel, which is described in (16)

As (15a) shows, word-initial position supports a contrast between voiced stops (headed |N|), nasal stops (non-headed |N|) and plain stops (no |N|) Word-internally, however, voiced stops display a weakening effect where-

by headed |N| loses its headedness to leave non-headed |N| The resulting expression with non-headed |N| is phonetically realised as a pre-nasalised

the consonant in question does not occupy a domain-initial position, and therefore, has no prosodic marking function to perform Since headed |N| in Northern Tohoku Japanese acts as a domain boundary marker and is re-stricted to word-initial position, it is forced to undergo some kind of struc-tural change when it appears in other contexts In this respect the Japanese pattern illustrated here is typical, in that it introduces a minimal structural change whereby the element itself is retained but is reduced to its non-headed form

6

The voiced stops in present-day Japanese are thought to derive historically from intervocalic prenasalised stops (Vance 1987), which suggests that voicing is a neutralisation process and that prenasalised stops are structurally stronger than their voiced counterparts Alternatively, however, it could be argued that the voic-ing effect in question is one of spontaneous voicing (Nasukawa 2005), which is regularly observed in intervocalic position On this basis, the voicing effect would constitute a weakening process in which a marked laryngeal property is lost

7

In consonants, non-headed |N| has two phonetic interpretations: when bined with |H| (which broadly defines the class of obstruents) it produces pre-nasalisation (e.g [mb] |Ɂ U H N|), and without |H| it produces nasality in sonorants (e.g [m] |Ɂ U N|) For a full description, see Nasukawa (2005)

com-vant domain is the prosodic word In this system, therefore, headed |N| marks word-initial position, as illustrated in (15).

As (15a) shows, word-initial position supports a contrast between voiced stops (headed |N|), nasal stops (non-headed |N|) and plain stops (no |N|) Word-internally, however, voiced stops display a weakening effect where-

by headed |N| loses its headedness to leave non-headed |N| The resulting expression with non-headed |N| is phonetically realised as a pre-nasalised

the consonant in question does not occupy a domain-initial position, and therefore, has no prosodic marking function to perform Since headed |N| in Northern Tohoku Japanese acts as a domain boundary marker and is re-stricted to word-initial position, it is forced to undergo some kind of struc-tural change when it appears in other contexts In this respect the Japanese pattern illustrated here is typical, in that it introduces a minimal structural change whereby the element itself is retained but is reduced to its non-headed form

6

The voiced stops in present-day Japanese are thought to derive historically from intervocalic prenasalised stops (Vance 1987), which suggests that voicing is a neutralisation process and that prenasalised stops are structurally stronger than their voiced counterparts Alternatively, however, it could be argued that the voic-ing effect in question is one of spontaneous voicing (Nasukawa 2005), which is regularly observed in intervocalic position On this basis, the voicing effect would constitute a weakening process in which a marked laryngeal property is lost

7

In consonants, non-headed |N| has two phonetic interpretations: when bined with |H| (which broadly defines the class of obstruents) it produces pre-nasalisation (e.g [mb] |Ɂ U H N|), and without |H| it produces nasality in sonorants (e.g [m] |Ɂ U N|) For a full description, see Nasukawa (2005)

com-In all of the languages discussed so far, structural markers (i.e headed

elements) have identified the left boundary of the relevant domain And

indeed, this appears to be the default case However, if some grammars

highlight domain-initial position as being linguistically significant, then we

can expect to find other grammars which assign prominence to

domain-final position too, at least as the marked option Kaqchikel (a

Mesoameri-can language spoken in Guatemala) is a case in point, where aspiration

represented by headed |H| serves as the domain marker and where the

rele-vant domain is the prosodic word (Nasukawa, Yasugi and Koizumi 2013)

In Kaqchikel, however, headed |H| is anchored to the right edge of the word

domain, as shown in (16)

In this language, aspirated stops containing headed |H| are restricted to

word-final position Whenever (what is lexically) an aspirate occurs in any

other context, it undergoes the same suppression of headedness that we

observed in (13) for Swedish

Up to this point we have only considered languages in which prosodic

possible for vowel elements to act as prosodic markers — recall from §3.1

that the vowel elements |I|, |U| and |A| appear in consonants by serving as

place elements In Arabic, for example, there is a ban on two labial

conso-nants from co-occurring in the same root, as well as a ban on two velars

(Alderete, Tupper and Frisch 2012) Initially, these two co-occurrence

re-strictions appear to operate independently, but in fact it is possible to treat

the two in parallel since Element Theory uses the same element to represent

both labials and velars: headed |U| encodes labial place while non-headed

|U| encodes velar place (Backley and Nasukawa 2009b) We may generalise,

therefore, by saying that the |U| element demarcates a root domain in

Ara-bic, where |U| subsumes the natural class of labials and velars Meanwhile,

in other languages the headed or non-headed status of an element can affect

that element’s ability to serve as a domain marker For instance, there are

languages in which domains are marked out by labials (headed |U|) but not

by velars (non-headed |U|); examples include Zulu (Doke 1926) and

Ponapean (Rehg and Sohl 1981, Goodman 1995) In contrast to the

situa-tion just described, it is unusual to find headed |I| or headed |A| operating as

a prosodic marker This is consistent with the view held by some Element Theory scholars (e.g Van der Torre 2003) that |U| is more consonantal in

with |Ɂ|, |H| and |N| in a way that |I| and |A| do not It is not surprising, therefore, that headed |U| is able to function as a prosodic marker just like

5 Discussion

The examples in §4 demonstrate how particular segment types such as rates, ejectives and voiced obstruents can sometimes have a restricted dis-tribution, being permitted to occur only in domain-initial (or more rarely, domain-final) position In other words, only one occurrence of these seg-

distribu-tional pattern, scholars have typically made appeal to the OCP As cussed in §1, the OCP serves as a meta-principle which rules against the co-occurrence of identical objects But in reality, treating these patterns as having resulted from the OCP does no more than put a label on them — itdoes not explain how or why more than one token of a particular segmental property is banned within certain domains Moreover, an approach based

dis-on the OCP would require the OCP itself to be redefined, since the lished form of the OCP as given in (1) refers only to identical units that are adjacent, and in the examples in (13)-(16) the relevant segments are not strictly adjacent — they merely belong to the same domain

estab-The alternative proposed here does not rely on the OCP in any form ther, it argues that there are some languages in which consonantal features such as aspiration, ejectiveness and obstruent voicing function not as seg-mental properties but as domain markers In a sense, this approach echoes Firthian prosodic analysis to the extent that a given property may be associ-ated with a domain larger than the segment According to this view, a ban

Ra-8

Owing to the vocalic bias of |I|, almost all languages have front vowels of some kind whereas not all have palatal consonants And owing to the consonantal bias of |U|, almost all languages have labial consonants whereas some lack round-

ed vowels Acquisition also highlights the consonantal nature of |U|, in that infants typically acquire the labials [p] and [m] before acquiring the rounding contrast in vowels We acknowledge that the Element Theory formalism would benefit from a way of capturing this asymmetry explicitly

9

Further examples are discussed in MacEachern (1999) and Blust (2012)

tion just described, it is unusual to find headed |I| or headed |A| operating as

a prosodic marker This is consistent with the view held by some Element Theory scholars (e.g Van der Torre 2003) that |U| is more consonantal in

with |Ɂ|, |H| and |N| in a way that |I| and |A| do not It is not surprising, therefore, that headed |U| is able to function as a prosodic marker just like

5 Discussion

The examples in §4 demonstrate how particular segment types such as rates, ejectives and voiced obstruents can sometimes have a restricted dis-tribution, being permitted to occur only in domain-initial (or more rarely, domain-final) position In other words, only one occurrence of these seg-

distribu-tional pattern, scholars have typically made appeal to the OCP As cussed in §1, the OCP serves as a meta-principle which rules against the co-occurrence of identical objects But in reality, treating these patterns as having resulted from the OCP does no more than put a label on them — itdoes not explain how or why more than one token of a particular segmental property is banned within certain domains Moreover, an approach based

dis-on the OCP would require the OCP itself to be redefined, since the lished form of the OCP as given in (1) refers only to identical units that are adjacent, and in the examples in (13)-(16) the relevant segments are not strictly adjacent — they merely belong to the same domain

estab-The alternative proposed here does not rely on the OCP in any form ther, it argues that there are some languages in which consonantal features such as aspiration, ejectiveness and obstruent voicing function not as seg-mental properties but as domain markers In a sense, this approach echoes Firthian prosodic analysis to the extent that a given property may be associ-ated with a domain larger than the segment According to this view, a ban

Ra-8

Owing to the vocalic bias of |I|, almost all languages have front vowels of some kind whereas not all have palatal consonants And owing to the consonantal bias of |U|, almost all languages have labial consonants whereas some lack round-

ed vowels Acquisition also highlights the consonantal nature of |U|, in that infants typically acquire the labials [p] and [m] before acquiring the rounding contrast in vowels We acknowledge that the Element Theory formalism would benefit from a way of capturing this asymmetry explicitly

9

Further examples are discussed in MacEachern (1999) and Blust (2012)