Emergent faithfulness to morphological and semantic heads in lexical blends*

Lexical morphemes in Emai are a “privileged position” compared to functional ones: The vowel in the function morpheme is tampered with to spare the vowel in the lexical morpheme. Previous research has identified phonological privilege in several other positions, including word-initial syllables (Beckman, 1998), stressed syllables (Alderete, 1995), syllable onsets (Lombardi, 1999), nouns (Smith, 2001), proper nouns (Jaber, 2011), and morphological roots (Alderete, 1999). The Positional Faithfulness hypothesis is that these effects are caused by position-specific versions of ordinary, general faithfulness constraints. For example, Revithiadou proposes that underlying stress and accent are protected by positional privilege in morphological heads (taking the head to be the element that determines the lexical category, gender, and other morphosyntactic properties) (Revithiadou, 1999). The phenomenon is illustrated in (2).