Root-Controlled Fusion in Zoque: Root-Faith and Neutralization Avoidance

A growing body of work in Optimality Theory reveals the privileged status of roots compared to affixes in natural languages. This has lead to the postulation of distinct faithfulness constraints for roots and affixes, and most researchers agree that the ranking FAITHROOT >> FAITHAFFIX universally holds. In this paper, I argue that this approach is further supported by the behavior of fusion found in Zoque where features from roots always take precedence over features from affixes. Further, I show that root-controlledness of fusion interacts interestingly with a constraint against contrast neutralization within a paradigm.