Morphologically derived environment effects (MDEEs) are well-known examples where phonotactic patterns in the lexicon mismatch with what is allowed at morphological boundaries – alternations. Analyses of MDEEs usually assume that the alternation is morphologically general, and that the sequences ‘repaired’ across morpheme boundaries are phonotactically well-formed in the lexicon. This paper examines the phonotactic patterns in the lexicon of two languages with MDEEs: Korean palatalisation and Turkish velar deletion. I show that Korean heteromorphemic sequences that undergo palatalisation are underattested in the lexicon. A computational learner learns a markedness constraint that drives palatalisation, suggesting a pattern of exceptional non-undergoing. This contrasts with Turkish, where the relevant constraint motivating velar deletion at the morpheme boundary is unavailable from phonotactic learning, and where the alternation is an example of exceptional triggering. These results indicate that MDEEs are not a unitary phenomenon, highlighting the need to examine these patterns in closer quantitative detail.

Incomplete neutralisation presents a problem for classical modular feed-forward grammars: it results in surface phonetic distinctions between phonologically neutralised segments. This paper argues for a model of incomplete neutralisation using two independently motivated theoretical devices: paradigm uniformity and weighted phonetic constraints. A case study is presented, showing that Japanese monomoraic lengthening results in incomplete neutralisation: when monomoraic nouns with short vowels are lengthened to fill a bimoraic minimality requirement, they reach a duration intermediate between that of unlengthened short vowels and underlyingly long vowels. The Japanese case has properties distinct from other classically cited examples of incomplete neutralisation such as final devoicing, which are not predicted by previous theories of neutralisation. The Weighted Paradigm Uniformity theory of incomplete neutralisation is shown to make four unique predictions, and is argued to better capture the typology of incomplete neutralisation.

Although a growing body of literature in formal phonology has espoused the view that phonological knowledge is gradient and probabilistic, this perspective remains somewhat controversial. This paper provides further empirical support for this strand of work: it offers an analysis of the gradient deletion of word-final schwa in Southern French, using a corpus containing 7787 data points obtained from 45 subjects spread over three dialectal areas (the Basque Country, Languedoc and Provence). In addition to confirming or nuancing previous findings about the role of several phonological and non-phonological variables, the study demonstrates the influence of lexical frequency, grammatical category, sonority and the feature specification of the consonant before schwa.

The categorical deletion of unstressed vowels from iterative feet differentiates serial theories of phonology from parallel theories. Of at least equal importance is whether language learners acquire rhythmic syncope. A potentially illustrative case comes from the recent development of Nishnaabemwin (Algonquian), which extended unstressed vowel reduction until it approximated categorical rhythmic syncope. In response, an entire generational cohort reportedly carried out a dramatic restructuring by innovating a novel set of person prefixes and losing the surface alternations. However, the original reports are subject to some dispute. To shed further light on the status of rhythmic syncope in Modern Nishnaabemwin, this paper details three surveys of the first cohort of speakers born during the near-syncope period. The surveys indicate that, despite familiarity with the original system, the entire generational cohort uniformly adopted the innovative system.

Scottish Gaelic displays a phonological contrast that is realised in different dialects by means of tonal accent, glottalisation or overlength. In line with existing analyses of similar oppositions in languages such as Swedish, Danish, Franconian and Estonian, I show that this contrast reflects a difference in metrical structure. Using the framework of Stratal Optimality Theory, I argue that this metrical contrast is derived, and results from faithfulness to foot structure that is built regularly at the stem level, but rendered opaque by subsequent phonological processes. Scottish Gaelic therefore represents an intermediate stage in the diachronic development of underlyingly contrastive metrical structure. This analysis successfully accounts for the complex properties of svarabhakti, a process of copy epenthesis that is intimately connected to the phonological contrast in question, and also sheds light upon the relationship between the oppositions of tonal accent, glottalisation and overlength found in various languages of northern Europe.

In previous surveys of long-distance consonant harmony, the major place features [labial], [dorsal] and [coronal] are conspicuously absent from the set of possible harmonising features. Ngbaka Minagende displays major place harmony between labial-dorsal segments and simple labials and velars, thus filling this empirical gap. The presence of complex segments with multiple place is crucial to seeing this harmony pattern clearly. These patterns are best handled in the Agreement by Correspondence framework with an active CC-Ident[place] constraint. Other analyses either cannot capture the pattern at all or require fundamental changes elsewhere in phonological theory. The data are supported by a new digitisation and statistical analysis of a Ngbaka Minagende dictionary.

While many phonological patterns target classes of sounds that can be defined phonetically, a large number of patterns in descriptive grammars involve sounds that cannot be easily characterised in phonetic terms. This finding suggests that phonological patterns themselves must be taken into account when learning phonological representations, and that phonological classes may emerge in learning from both phonetic factors (bottom-up) and phonological patterns (top-down). The current work presents a case of a phonetically unnatural class in South Bolivian Quechua that is active in the phonology of the language, and provides experimental support that this class is referred to by speakers’ grammars. While many cases of phonetically unnatural classes have been documented in descriptions of language patterns, in most cases there is little or no evidence that these patterns or classes are represented by speakers as they are described by linguists.

This paper presents an analysis of exceptional prosodification effects, in which exceptional lexical items appear to follow a regular pattern that is found in a different prosodic context. These patterns have been analysed as cases of prosodic prespecification, where morphemes select a non-default prosodic representation. I argue that prespecification approaches should be reconsidered, and that such patterns are predicted without morpheme-specific prosody in Gradient Harmonic Grammar, a weighted constraint system with gradiently active symbols. Exceptional prosodification effects result from the interaction of two influences on constraint penalties: (i) scaling of constraint violations by prosodic context and (ii) contrastive activity values in underlying forms. This interaction is illustrated with the distribution of French nasal vowels and linking [n]. This approach reduces the amount of structure posited for URs, and provides new arguments for a more uniform syntax–prosody mapping.

What is the status of schwa in Tashlhiyt? How does it pattern at the segmental and suprasegmental levels? This paper studies these questions by examining the frequencies with which schwa is inserted in different segmental contexts, and by exploring the nature of the interaction between schwa insertion and prosodic prominence. The results show the coexistence of two types of schwa in the language: a transitional schwa and a prosodically triggered schwa. The former is ignored by the phonological system of the language; its occurrence depends solely on the phonetic characteristics of the adjacent consonants. The latter surfaces whenever a prosodically prominent feature does not attach to a vowel or sonorant already present within the word. Both schwas are argued to be manifestations of a more general principle governing the coordination pattern of consonant sequences in Tashlhiyt.

This paper re-examines theoretical constructs used in the analysis of Russian word stress, employing data from speakers with acquired surface dyslexia, a symptom which is characterised by impaired lexical access and preserved grapheme–phoneme correspondence rules. Russian stems have been traditionally analysed as lexically accented or unaccented, with a default rule deriving surface stress in the latter case. In the study reported here, we found no differences in the production of accented and unaccented stems. Instead, the analysis of errors revealed that the significant factors determining stress placement include stress neighbourhood and stress position. The speakers produced fewer errors in consistently spelled words, and there was a strong tendency to shift stress to the final syllable in consonant-final words, and to the penultimate syllable in vowel-final words. These results indicate that distributional properties play an important role in stress assignment in both accented and unaccented stem types.

Kaplan (2018a) argues for a positive and gradient version of positional licensing in Harmonic Grammar. A chief difference between this formalism and standard positional licensing is that it predicts that harmony whose goal is to place a feature in a licensing position may overshoot its target by extending beyond the licensing position. Centralisation harmony in Tudanca Montañés bears out this prediction: though harmony triggered by a final vowel typically stops at the stressed syllable, under particular circumstances it extends into the pretonic domain. Positive gradient positional licensing is indispensable in an account of this. It plays a central role in a gang effect that drives overshoot, an interaction that cannot be replicated with standard versions of positional licensing.

Šmartno is a critically endangered dialect of Slovenian that exhibits three interacting processes: final devoicing, unstressed high vowel deletion and vowel–glide coalescence. Their interaction is opaque: final obstruents devoice, unless they become final due to vowel deletion; high vowels delete, but not when created by coalescence. These patterns constitute a synchronic chain shift that leads to two emergent contrasts: final obstruent voicing and vowel length (due to compensatory lengthening). The paper examines all nominal paradigms, and complements them with an acoustic analysis of vowel duration and obstruent voicing. This work presents one of the most thoroughly documented instances of counterfeeding opacity on environment.

This paper proposes that closed syllable laxing and open syllable tensing of non-low vowels are motivated by conflicting strategies of contrast enhancement in vowel–consonant sequences. Laxing enhances the distinctiveness of consonant contrasts by allowing for more distinct VC formant transitions, in particular in sequences involving a non-low vowel followed by an oral labial/coronal/velar consonant (e.g. [p t k]). Tensing enhances the distinctiveness of vowel contrasts by providing more distinct formant realisations for vowels. Linguistic variation results from different ways of resolving the tension between maximising vowel dispersion and maximising consonant dispersion. Laxing typically applies before coda consonants as a way to compensate for the absence of good perceptual cues to place of articulation. The hypothesis that laxing enhances the distinctiveness of postvocalic place contrasts is supported by a study of mid-vowel laxing in French, which corroborates the general claim that perceptual contrast plays a role in shaping phonotactic restrictions.

Ternary or three-level vowel length is typologically rare, and supporting evidence is limited. This paper presents the results of an investigation into the hypothesised case of this configuration in Shilluk. We first describe the role of vowel length in Shilluk phonology and morphology, and then report on an acoustic study in which minimal sets for vowel length (short, long, overlong) are measured for vowel duration, coda duration, vowel quality and fundamental frequency. Short, long and overlong vowels differ significantly and substantially in terms of vowel duration: 96% of the items can be classified successfully for vowel length on the basis of this measurement alone. Of the other measurements, only vowel quality is significant, and this effect is considerably smaller. The mean values for vowel duration – 68, 111 and 150 ms for short, long and overlong vowels respectively – are similar to those reported for ternary vowel length in Dinka.

Language-specific maximal size restrictions on syllables have been defined using frames such as moraic structure. In General American English, a trimoraic syllable template makes largely successful predictions about contexts where tense/lax vowel contrasts are neutralised, but neutralisation preceding a coda rhotic has not been adequately explained. We attribute the apparent special properties of coda /ɹ/ to two characteristics of its representation, informed by our articulatory investigation: sequential coordination of dorsal and coronal subsegmental units and a high blending strength specification, corresponding to high coarticulatory dominance. Characteristics of coda laterals are compared. Our approach employs phonological representations where sequencing is encoded directly among subsegments, and coordination is sensitive to strength. Mora assignment is computed over sequencing of subsegments, predicting that complex segments may be bimoraic. The account brings phonotactics for rhymes with postvocalic liquids into line with the trimoraic template, and supports representing coordination and strength at the subsegmental level.

This study uses an artificial language learning experiment and computational modelling to test Kiparsky's claims about Maximal Utilisation and Transparency biases in phonological acquisition. A Maximal Utilisation bias would prefer phonological patterns in which all rules are maximally utilised, and a Transparency bias would prefer patterns that are not opaque. Results from the experiment suggest that these biases affect the learnability of specific parts of a language, with Maximal Utilisation affecting the acquisition of individual rules, and Transparency affecting the acquisition of rule orderings. Two models were used to simulate the experiment: an expectation-driven Harmonic Serialism learner and a sequence-to-sequence neural network. The results from these simulations show that both models’ learning is affected by these biases, suggesting that the biases emerge from the learning process rather than any explicit structure built into the model.

Many languages exhibit nasal cluster dissimilation, in which an illicit sequence of nasal–stop clusters is modified in some way (e.g. NC1VNC2 → N1VNC2). This article discusses generalisations in the typology of nasal cluster dissimilation, and claims that nasal cluster dissimilation is driven by constraints on contrast distinctiveness: it occurs preferentially in those environments where the first NC is most confusable with a plain nasal consonant. I propose an analysis that appeals to auditory factors, and provide acoustic and perceptual evidence that is consistent with it.

This article responds to Pater (2018) by arguing for a view of phonology that captures the computational properties of phonological processes. Jardine's (2016) statement that tone is formally more complex than segmental phonology is not a claim, as Pater characterises it, but an empirical observation. This article outlines how phonological theories can incorporate such observations, and integrate them with considerations of phonological substance. The conclusion is that, while computational characterisations are not necessarily alternatives to Optimality Theory, it is extremely diffcult to capture the computational nature of phonological processes in Optimality Theory, due to the expressive power of global optimisation.

Köhnlein (2016) proposes to represent the Franconian tone contrast as a difference in foot structure, whereby Accent 1 appears in lexically marked syllabic trochees and Accent 2 in default moraic trochees, as an alternative to analyses with an underlying privative tone for Accent 2. After sketching the two approaches, we argue against three arguments Köhnlein advances in favour of the metrical analysis. We then show that one of the disadvantages incurred by the metrically derived tonal representations is the introduction of a novel and otherwise unsupported concept of a single tone that incorporates two morphologically different but phonologically identical tones. We also evaluate Köhnlein's (2018) more recent proposal to use the syllabic trochee to account for subtractive plurals in tonal dialects. Finally, we compare the predictive powers of the metrical and tonal analyses of the Arzbach dialect.

We present three case studies of marginal contrasts in Tongan loans from English, working with data from three speakers. Although Tongan lacks contrasts in stress or in CC vs. CVC sequences, secondary stress in loans is contrastive, and is sensitive to whether a vowel has a correspondent in the English source word; vowel deletion is also sensitive to whether a vowel is epenthetic as compared to the English source; and final vowel length is sensitive to whether the penultimate vowel is epenthetic, and if not, whether it corresponds to a stressed or unstressed vowel in the English source. We provide an analysis in the multilevel model of Boersma (1998) and Boersma & Hamann (2009), and show that the loan patterns can be captured using only constraints that plausibly are needed for native-word phonology, including constraints that reflect perceptual strategies.