Stress can be signaled through a number of different acoustic properties, including increased duration, greater intensity, and higher fundamental frequency. Stress may also affect segmental and syllable structure. Typically, stressed syllables trigger qualitative fortition and/or lengthening, whereas unstressed syllables are associated with lenition and/or shortening. To take an example of a st...

In this paper we describe a method for learning grammars in the general framework of Harmonic Serialism (see McCarthy this volume for references and an introduction). We have two main goals. The first is to address the hidden structure problem that serial derivations introduce. The second is to address the problem of learning variation, which has yet to be confronted in this framework (see also...

This paper proposes an Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993) [OT]-based generator of the Interlanguage [IL]1 syllabification of Korean speakers of English. Basically, I accept the ideas of 'cyclic CON-EVAL loop' and 'locally encoded finite candidate set' proposed by Hammond (1995, 1997b). However, in order to treat some features of Korean accented English such as vowel epenthesis, segmen...

1 Abstract In this paper I shall propose an account of morphosyntactic phenomena like European Por-tuguese (hence: EP) cliticization in terms of interacting morphophonological and surface-syntactic constraints. In particular, I suggest that mor-phophonological constraints are partially under-speciied with respect to morpheme linearization, information that will be added monotonically by surface...

Repetition is avoided in countless human languages and at a variety of grammatical levels. In this dissertation I ask what it is that makes repetition so bad. I propose that at least three distinct biases against repetition exist. First, repetition of articulatory gestures is relatively difficult. This difficulty results in phonetic variation that may lead to categorical phonological avoidance....

In optimality theory, the grammar evaluates candidate outputs in parallel against a hierarchy of ranked, violable constraints. One of the main advantages of this framework is its ability to capture nonlocal dependencies straightforwardly, obviating the need to build the ill-formed intermediate structures that are sometimes inevitable in bottom-up approaches. A major challenge for parallel evalu...

This study accounts for the acquisition of the consonant clusters of English syllable structures both in onset and coda positions by Persian EFL learners. Persian syllable structure is "CV(CC)", composed of one consonant at the initial position and two optional consonants at the final position; whereas English syllable structure is "(CCC)V(CCCC)". Therefore, Persian EFL learners need to resolve...

Since the times of the old Arab grammarians, the syllable has played a major role in the phonology of classical as well as colloquial Arabic. In the 1970s, phonologists investigated Cairene Arabic (CA) syllable structure and found it to be the domain of some phonological processes, such as emphatic spread, CVC syllables light word final but heavy word internally, limitations on consonant cluste...

The class of liquid consonants, which traditionally groups laterals and (most) rhotics (Catford 1977:237), has been called into question by recent research examining phonological features. The primary issue with defining the class based on a shared feature [liquid] is that unlike [nasal], for example, there is no agreed upon measurable phonetic correlate to the phonological feature. Dickey (199...