This paper presents a theory of morphophonology based on a development in the theory of faithfulness in Optimality Theory. A new constraint type, anti-faithfulness, is proposed that evaluates a pair of related words and requires an alternation in the shared stem. This constraint type is motivated initially by a set of problems, e.g. morphological deletions, segmental exchanges and non-structure preserving processes, which show that morphophonology must encompass more than markedness–faithfulness interactions. The anti-faithfulness thesis is then applied to accentual processes in which affixes idiosyncratically cause deletion of accent in a neighbouring morpheme. It is argued that anti-faithfulness both motivates the observed deletion and accounts for its properties with principles that are generally available in phonological theory. Anti-faithfulness is then shown to extend naturally to the analysis of other affix-induced alternations, including accent insertions, shifts, and retractions of stress and tone, a result which distinguishes this theory from plausible alternatives.

Among 4,499 segmental malformations found in English loanwords in three large corpora of French, the laryngeal /h/ is the only segment that is never adapted, i.e. replaced by another segment. We suggest that the systematic deletion of /h/ in French follows from the fact that, phonologically, French, like Portuguese and Italian, does not employ the Pharyngeal node, the articulator that characterises gutturals. This prevents English /h/ from being handled phonologically (deleted or substituted) in those languages. The non-availability of the Pharyngeal node also explains systematic deletion of the pharyngeal and laryngeal gutturals in Arabic loanwords in French. In contrast, English /h/ is adapted by languages employing the Pharyngeal node phonologically, such as Spanish, Bulgarian, Catalan, Mandarin Chinese, Greek and Russian. Likewise, the availability of the Pharyngeal node in Fula and English allows the adaptation of Arabic pharyngeal and laryngeal gutturals in Fula, and non-glottal gutturals in English.