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Maximal prominence and a theory of possible licensors

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Abstract

Languages often single out prominent positions for special consideration, allowing certain elements to appear only in those positions. Often material in the prominent position surfaces faithfully but neutralizes elsewhere (preservation systems), but other systems involve the spreading or migration of features to the prominent position to comply with the positional restriction (overwrite systems). The set of positions that behave as prominent for preservation seems to be a superset of the positions that behave as prominent for overwrite. This paper argues that this asymmetry stems from differences between positional faithfulness and positional licensing. Only positional licensing produces overwrite; it is argued here that it may target only the most prominent positions, while positional faithfulness, which produces preservation, may target all kinds of prominent positions.

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Notes

  1. As an anonymous reviewer points out, the data in (3) are also consistent with the view that it is initial—not stressed—syllables that are important here. Evidence in favor of stressed syllables comes from a word like , which has final stress according to Paster (2004:389). Were initial syllables the relevant privileged position, we might expect instead, similar to ‘mommy’ Consequently, I assume that stressed syllables are the privileged position in Buchan Scots, though nothing crucial hinges on this choice: Sect. 2.2 discusses the positions that participate in preservation systems, and as we will see, there are ample unambiguous systems for both stressed and initial syllables, so the ambiguity of (3) does not affect the larger argument.

  2. Buchan Scots is a bit more complicated this: ‘hazy’ shows that when harmony is blocked, the otherwise illicit high vowel survives. This suggests that [–high] cannot be epenthesized to replace the suffix’s [+high]—this feature must be acquired via harmony, and when intervening consonants prevent this, the generalization concerning [+high] in this position is violated.

  3. Walker additionally identifies the head mora of the stressed syllable as the privileged position in a process from the Ligurian dialects of Italy. I take this to be a special case of stressed-syllable privilege for present purposes.

  4. Again, this is a generalization about vowels and their features. Tones, of course, are another matter: Zhang (2001) argues that final syllables’ phonetic properties make them very good hosts for contour tones, and Zoll (1997) develops an analysis of contour tones’ attraction to final syllables. In Sect. 5.1 I argue, following Zhang, that this attraction is due to final syllables’ greater duration, not their prominence.

  5. Campbell (1959:83, fn. 3) notes that some compounds also allow umlaut of the first member. So alongside and he provides and . Perhaps this shows that for at least some speakers these words lost their compound status and umlaut began targeting the primary stress for the entire word, spreading through the intervening syllable.

  6. For example, Canalis (2007) proposes the following metrical hierarchy for certain varieties of Italian: Stressed Vowel > Unstressed Pretonic Vowel > Word-Final Unstressed Vowel > Penultimate Vowel of Proparoxytone (see also Canalis 2009, to appear).

  7. Recall that Ligurian dialects of Italy seem to adopt the head mora of the stressed syllable as a privileged position (fn. 3). This might motivate yet another prominence hierarchy that encodes relationships among moras in various positions.

  8. Hock specifically references utterance-final elements here, not word-final contexts more generally. He argues that this position exhibits phonetic pressures for weakening that are absent in word-final, utterance-medial contexts. But he also points out a tendency of utterance-final effects to be generalized to word-final contexts, so while final-syllable avoidance may begin as an utterance-level phenomenon, it can be extended to the domain of the word as well.

  9. An anonymous reviewer asks whether all seemingly prominence-driven final-syllable effects can be reduced to duration-driven ones. This seems unlikely because, as discussed in Sect. 5.4, final syllables often undergo augmentation, which Smith (2005) argues to be a prominence-driven effect.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the following people for their generous feedback on various versions of this work: Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Rachel Hayes-Harb, Robert Henderson, Abby Kaplan, Rachel Walker, the audience at the 21st Manchester Phonology Meeting, and three anonymous reviewers. Their comments and questions have been enormously helpful.

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Kaplan, A. Maximal prominence and a theory of possible licensors. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 33, 1235–1270 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9273-5

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