On the Prosodic Misalignment of Onsetless Syllables

• Published in: Natural language and linguistic theory Vol. 16; no. 1; pp. 1 - 52
• Main Author: Downing, Laura J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Kluwer Academic Publishers 01.02.1998; Springer; D. Reidel Publishing Co; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Descriptive studies and applied theories; Lexical stress; Linguistic morphology; Linguistics; Optimality theory; Phonology; Prosody; Reduplication; Sentence stress; Solmization; Stress; Syllables; Tableaux; Tone; Verbs; Vowels; Words; Phonology; Alignment; Syllabe; Prosody; Optimality theory
• ISSN: 0167-806X; 1573-0859
• DOI: 10.1023/A:1005968714712

Cross-linguistically, onsetless syllables not only have limited distribution but also exhibit exceptional prosody: in some languages they are excluded from reduplication, or cannot bear main stress or a high tone. These exceptional properties are clearly linked to the relative ill-formedness of onsetless syllables, but previous analyses do not formalize this correlation in a way that generalizes straightforwardly to all cases of exceptional prosody. I argue in this paper that the theory of Generalized Alignment (McCarthy and Prince 1993a,b), developed within Optimality Theory, provides us with a unified way of accounting for onsetless syllable exceptionality. By constraining the domains for phonological processes to optimally begin with optimal syllables, the exceptional prosody of onsetless syllables can uniformly be analyzed as prosodically motivated constituent misalignment.