the third person singular enclitic verb /-ast/ which is equivalent to english verb “is” undergoes the highest number of  phonological processes among persian enclitic forms of the verb “boudan” (to be); it changes to [as] in one environment, to [s] in another, and to [e] in four environments. deletion of /t/ is common in all six contexts. these different pronunciations are determined by various...

careful analysis of the ferdows persian accent showed that the back vowel /a/ changes to front vowel [a] in the first syllable of bi-syllabic words and in the second syllable of tri-syllabic words. however, this does not occur in the last syllable. it was also found that different processes occur before nasals; /a/ changes to [o] before /m/. but before /n/, it changes to [a] in the penult of ...

the changing of round and back vowel /u/ to unround and front vowel [i] occurs in lori dialects as well as some other persian dialects. this vowel change includes both unrounding and fronting. this paper aimed at coming up with an inclusive ranking of constraints to explain occurrence and nonoccurrence of this vowel change in various phonological environments in silahkori dialect within optimal...

Optimality Theory (henceforth OT) (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004) is based upon lexicographic optimization. It differs in this respect from Harmonic Grammar (henceforth HG) (Legendre et al. 1990a, Legendre et al. 1990b), which is based upon linear numeric optimization. Differences between the two have been discussed in several places, including (Legendre et al. 2006, Pater et al. 2007a, Prince...

Non-structure preserving phonological processes are defined by the emergence of a segment which is assumed to be absent from the lexical inventory of the language in question and, hence not contrastive. A central tenet of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004, McCarthy & Prince 1993, 1995, 1999), the Richness of the Base Hypothesis (RotB; Prince & Smolensky 1993) states that lingu...

This paper proposes a phonological analysis for vowel devoicing in Tokyo Japanese using the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993). Generally speaking, in Japanese the high vowels /i, u/ are devoiced when they occur between two voiceless consonants. However, there are some contexts where such a simple generalization does not hold, e.g., so called “word-final devoicing” and ...

Since the publication of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993), research on phonological acquisition has been exploring the explicative potential of constraint theories. This study is equally based on Optimality Theory. It attempts to analyze the acquisition of CVVC syllable structure by Brazilian Portuguese children and addresses the question of the use of Local Conjunction (Smolensky, ...

In this paper, I will give a detailed account of vowel harmony, disharmony, dissimilation, and elision in Yucatec Maya. These phenomena provide insights for the treatment of assimilation in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993). The theoretical topics to be dealt with are (i) an adequate formalisation of phonological feature assimilation within Correspondence Theory (McCarthy & Prince 199...