Coronal Specification and Licensing in Place Assimilation
نویسنده
چکیده
Based on unmarkedness of coronal cross-linguistically, coronal has been considered to be underspecified. Also, place assimilation where coronal tends to assimilate to the adjacent labial or velar by a featurefilling rule has been support the underspecification of coronals. I instead argue that coronal should be specified in Optimality Theory despite its unmarkedness, and place assimilation no longer provides evidence of underspecification of coronal. In addition, I maintain that place assimilation is a way of respecting licensing requirements and that a licensing hierarchy with respect to place feature of a coda empirically resolve current issues regarding coronal underspecification and place assimilation.
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