Mismatches in weight criteria across weight-sensitive processes within individual languages present difficulties for theories of moraic structure, particularly regarding coda weight. Previous accounts, which stipulate that codas are variably moraic to account for the typological variation in the weight status of CVC for primary stress, make incorrect predictions for the status of CVC in other weight-sensitive phenomena, including tone, word minimality and secondary stress, among others. This article proposes a theory of Uniform Moraic Quantity coupled with a new syllable weight metric as a solution, which captures CVC’s flexible weight status while maintaining the cross-linguistic moraicity of codas and avoiding the incorrect predictions that frustrate the standard variable-weight approach.

It is well-known that English variable word-final coronal stop deletion (CSD) is less likely to occur when the final coronal stop instantiates the inflectional suffix -ed. It is sometimes hypothesised that the reason for this effect is to avoid the homophony between past and present tenses that would result from the suffix -ed being deleted. This reasoning suggests another hypothesis: that CSD should also be disfavoured when it would create homophony between two distinct lexical items, such as bald and ball. In this squib, we test that hypothesis on data from a corpus of Philadelphia English. We find no evidence that probability of CSD is affected by homophony avoidance between lexical items. This weakens the case that homophony avoidance is at play in disfavouring CSD in the -ed case, and may have implications for the theory of homophony avoidance in phonology in general.

This study tests the hypothesis that alternation patterns with strong lexical support are more robust than those with no, or weak, lexical support. Focusing on three alternation patterns in Korean with varying productivity and generality, we measured lexical support in two ways. First, we conducted an acceptability-rating experiment investigating Korean speakers’ judgements on non-words with and without violations of the phonotactic constraints motivating the alternations. In addition, we performed a simulation of learning a maximum entropy (MaxEnt) Harmonic Grammar from a dictionary corpus. The results of the experiment and computational modelling confirmed the hypothesis by showing that if an alternation is robust, its associated phonotactic constraint is learned with a high weight from the MaxEnt simulation, and it affects the participants’ well-formedness ratings for non-words. Consequently, the results of this research support the claim of a tight link between alternations and phonotactics.

It is well-attested that floating tones can associate across a word boundary, but it is typologically unusual for floating weight units to do so. The Nuer language presents a floating suprasegmental component (FSC), which is part of lexical morphemes, and includes a unit of quantity and a High tone. This component is located at the left edge of nouns and is realised primarily across a word boundary on a preceding vowel. This article examines the FSC through a phonological analysis and a production study with eight speakers. These investigations reveal how the FSC interacts with the specifications for vowel length and tone of the adjacent context. Specifically, the weight unit of the FSC lengthens a preceding word-final short vowel, and its High tone combines in a compositional manner with tone of this preceding context. Comparisons with related languages suggest that the FSC developed out of a word-initial vowel /a/.

Phonotactic learning has been a fertile ground for research in the field of phonology. However, the challenge of lexical exceptions in phonotactic learning remains largely unexplored. Traditional learning models, which typically assume all observed input data to be grammatical, often blur the distinction between lexical exceptions and grammatical words, consequently skewing the learning results. To address this issue, this article innovates a categorical-grammar-plus-exception-filtering approach that harnesses the discrete nature of categorical grammars to filter out lexical exceptions using statistical criteria adapted from probabilistic models. Applied to naturalistic corpora from English, Polish and Turkish, the learnt grammars showed a high correlation with the acceptability judgements in behavioural experiments. Compared to benchmark models, the model performs increasingly better with data that contain a higher proportion of lexical exceptions, reaching its peak in learning Turkish non-local vowel phonotactics, highlighting its ability to handle lexical exceptions.

Syllable integrity, the idea that the content of syllables may not be metrified separately, is often taken to be an inviolable constraint of grammar. This has been challenged in recent work, though the data are often subject to competing analyses. This article claims that syllable integrity is readily violable in Naasioi. Evidence from stress, the minimal word and metrically sensitive allomorphy supports an analysis of the metrical system operating on bimoraic feet, and in which long vowels can be metrified separately. Despite this, there is also evidence, in the form of vowel shortening and truncation, to indicate that long vowels constitute a single syllable. The net result is a stress system which systematically ignores syllables, a state of affairs which allows for syllable integrity violations to arise.

Words in Tagalog/Filipino can be either penult-prominent or ultima-prominent. Scholars have been divided on whether the language has stress, or only phonemic vowel length in penults and default phrase-final prominence. Using a corpus of Original Pilipino Music, we find that both prominent penults and prominent ultimas are set to longer notes and stronger beats, even in phrase-medial position. We further find that among pre-tonic syllables, those that would plausibly attract secondary stress are mostly set to longer notes and stronger beats. Text-setting does not faithfully reflect differences in phonetic cues between the two types of prominence, nor is it sensitive to presumed phonetic differences between high and low vowels. We conclude that songwriters’ text-setting decisions reflect phonological stress in Filipino, and that both penult-prominent and ultima-prominent words bear stress.

This article discusses data from a Romance variety spoken in the linguistic region of France referred to as the Croissant. When roots in this language exhibit a phonologically problematic right edge, the problem is treated differently depending on whether the stem is nominal or verbal. We propose that this unequal treatment reflects an underlying distinction: seemingly unsuffixed verbs are in fact underlyingly suffixed, whereas nouns are truly unsuffixed. The final consonant of the verbal stem is therefore not final underlyingly. It is claimed that this solution is preferable to relying on distinct grammars for nouns and verbs or assuming transderivational relations between words. The article also clarifies the purview of Strict CV, the framework that it is couched in. Strict CV is a theory of representations that defines well- and ill-formed structures, some of which are universal. It needs to be complemented by a theory of computation.

This paper presents a probabilistic model of loanword accentuation in Japanese, analysing a corpus of 3,017 English-based loanwords. Through corpus analysis and computational modelling, the study reveals that Japanese loanword accentuation involves two distinct types of faithfulness effects, alongside markedness effects. First, there is a significant influence of the stress patterns of English source words and the epenthetic status of loanword syllables. This challenges the common assumption that accents driven by faithfulness are merely sporadic exceptions, highlighting instead a probabilistic interplay between faithfulness and markedness. Second, this study uncovers faithfulness to Japanese speakers’ implicit knowledge of the English stress system. Rather than merely imitating the stress patterns of individual English words, Japanese speakers develop an internalised theory of the English stress system and mimic what they believe is the correct pronunciation according to their internalised theory.

This article introduces the blueprint model of production (BMP), which characterises the phonetics–phonology interface in terms of typed functions. The standard modular feed-forward view to the interface is that the phonetic form of a lexical item is the output of a phonetic module which takes the output of a phonological module as its input. The central idea of the BMP is that the phonetic form is instead the output of a higher-order phonetics function which takes the phonological function as one of multiple inputs. We explain how understanding the production process this way can account for systematic fine-grained variation in phonetic forms while maintaining a discrete phonological grammar. We present one possible instantiation of the model that simulates incomplete neutralisation, some cases of near-merger, and variation in homophone duration. Consequently, these types of systematic fine-grained phonetic patterns do not necessarily provide evidence against discrete, symbolic phonology.

In natural speech, phonetic cues that distinguish lexical items can be hyperarticulated when there is a minimal pair competitor, a process known as contrastive hyperarticulation. Building upon prior work, this article examines the cue-specific nature of contrastive hyperarticulation in Japanese, focussing on stop voice onset time (VOT) using a speech corpus. We confirmed that the existence of a voicing minimal pair competitor in the lexicon triggers hyperarticulation of VOT duration on the target segment (shorter for voiced stops and longer for voiceless stops), while other contrasts (singleton vs. geminate) did not. The results also suggest that contrastive hyperarticulation (a) is more compatible with casual speech than slow/clear speech, (b) is sensitive to position in a word (greater in word-initial position than in non-initial position) and (c) applies to a greater degree in Japanese than in English due to properties of stops. This provides further evidence that the phonetic specificity of contrastive hyperarticulation is cross-linguistically relevant.

This article presents a dictionary-based study of vowel reduction and preservation in British English in initial pretonic position and intertonic position. The different variables which have been claimed to influence those processes are tested on a data set of over 4,500 words using regression analyses. Our results confirm the significant effects of syllable structure, position of the vowel, word frequency and opaque prefixation. They also provide weak evidence for other factors such as vowel features and the existence of a base in which the vowel bears a stress, although no clear effects of word segmentability could be found. We also report new findings, as we find that foreign words reduce less than non-foreign words; we find that [+back] vowels reduce less than [−back] vowels in initial pretonic position; and we find a difference in behaviour for vowels followed by /sC/ clusters between non-derived words and stress-shifted derivatives.

Phonotactic patterns are commonly constrained by morphology. In English, for example, non-homorganic nasal–stop sequences are disallowed within morphemes but may occur across morpheme boundaries. This article demonstrates that similar effects of morphology on phonotactics can be found with non-concatenative morphology, even though they involve morphological domains that are more difficult to identify on the surface. Specifically, vowel alternation in a class of Egyptian Arabic verbs is affected by gradient phonotactic restrictions on consonant–vowel co-occurrence. However, such restrictions are only active in the imperfective form (e.g., [-rgaʕ] ‘return.ipfv’), not the perfective (e.g., [rigiʕ] ‘return.pfv’). Using a lexicon study and a wug test, I show that this pattern is in fact bounded by morphological domains and is reliably generalised by speakers when deriving novel forms. I compare accounts of this effect that differ on whether they require abstract morphosyntactic representations and non-concatenative morphemes and discuss their implications.

The C2 dominance effect in cluster simplification, in which the second consonant is preserved over the first (V1C1C2V2 → V1C2V2), has been attributed to the perceptual salience of prevocalic consonants. However, this P-map account fails in classic Optimality Theory when syncope feeds cluster simplification (V1C1V0C2V2 → V1C1C2V2 → V1C2V2), as the input and output contexts do not differentiate C1 from C2. This article proposes a solution to this problem using correspondence constraints that reference acoustic transitions from and to vowels. Since syncope removes the targeted vowel and its associated transitions, Ident [transition] constraints cannot refer to the eliminated transitions. Specifically, the transition from C2 is protected by the relevant Ident [release transition] constraint, while C1’s transition is not. Thus, under the ranking of Ident [release transition] over Ident [closure transition], C1, despite being underlyingly prevocalic, remains subject to the C2 dominance effect and is targeted for deletion. This proposal also addresses interactions between syncope and other cluster reduction processes, such as major place assimilation and debuccalisation.

In Paraguayan Guaraní (PG), nasalisation processes affect material to both the left and right of a stressed nasal vowel. While some prior literature has claimed that bidirectional harmony is active in the language, others have noted that progressive nasalisation appears to be morpheme-specific and likely dependent on a different mechanism from regressive nasal harmony. Recent work shows that Spanish-origin lexical items participate in regressive nasal harmony, but the interactions of etymological origin and progressive nasalisation remain unclear. Drawing on a corpus of 26 sociolinguistic interviews as well as elicitation with native speakers of PG, I argue that the mechanisms underlying the two types of nasalisation in the language are in fact different. I propose that PG regressive nasalisation is best analysed as productive nasal harmony, while progressive nasalisation represents a case of morpheme-specific allomorphy. Additionally, though the PG pattern of regressive nasal harmony has been extended to items of Spanish origin, this is not the case for progressive nasalisation. This corpus study provides insight into the specific factors that condition variation in nasalisation processes, contributing to a growing literature investigating variable application of harmony.