English Nasal-Final Prefixes and Uniform Exponence

The purpose of this paper is to reconsider the phonology of English nasal-final prefixes within the framework of Optimality Theory, especially making use of a relation of correspondence. In this paper, I show that compared with previous analyses employing rules and their extrinsic orderings, a constraint-based approach can give a better account of the phenomenon. In order to do this, following Kenstowicz(1995), I posit a constraint of Uniform Exponence. In particular; I assume that the candidates for the allomorph of a prefix are evaluated so as to minimize allomorphic difference in the realization of the morpheme itself. I show that given the assumption above, we can account for the assimilation of the prefix-final nasals in a unified way by appropriately ranking the Uniform Exponence constraint among the other constraints.