The University of Iowa

Department of Linguistics Colloquium SeriesSpring 2016

Mora Potential in Weight-Bearing Strings

Kevin CarlsonUniversity of Iowa

Thursday, April 28, 20164:00 pm106 EPB

Gothic /φanh + an/ > [φa:.han], *[φa.han] (Braune, 2004) is a typical example of the purported opacity of consonant-triggered compensatory lengthening (CCL) to Optimality Theory (OT). The deletion of coda /n/ results in a free mora, which attaches itself to the preceding vowel. Morae linked to short non-syllabic consonants arise from a weight by position process (Hayes, 1989), hence not appearing in the underlying form. Because the surface form contains no correspondent to /n/, moreover, it reveals no information concerning the weight by position environment. Given that OT excludes intermediate forms, this renders the relevant mora invisible relative to OT. The typical response to such opacity is to circumvent OT via Mora Theory: syllable construction processes are applied to underlying forms, excluding any surface candidates inconsistent with the results. Although this practice of dividing analyses appealing to CCL into a moraic component and a classical OT component is certainly effective, it may be possible to remove the opacity necessitating this approach. If a demonstration of the requisite phenomena can be illustrated using a provably appropriate constraint (one mimicking the anticipated results of the workaround), it would no longer be necessary to classify CCL as opaque to OT in a wide variety of circumstances; rather, invoking mora structure could be presented as mirroring a specified OT process.

To this end, the intention is to derive a functional form for mora assignment via CCL in a manner such that the intermediate step of underlying form syllabification is not required. ‘Weight-bearing strings’ of segments in the form X i

M ( XV ) X1⋯ X X( XV ) are analyzed using only underlying specifications, the position of the string in the underlying prosodic word and variables dependent upon a limited number of constraint rankings. A function measuring ‘Mora Potential’ (M̂ (i)) indicates the maximal mora count that would appear in a fully-faithful surface representation of the string in question (adjusted to reflect CLOSESTMOTHER violations and non-underlying syllabic consonants). From here, the actual mora count of a surface syllable is compared to the summed M̂ (i) for all relevant weight-bearing strings. Those surface candidates containing a lower mora count than said sum are penalized by M̂ , a faithfulness constraint.

It bears noting that the approach outlined above applies only to syllables containing a nuclear correspondent to an underlying moraic segment. Work is ongoing to develop a more general function-constraint pair based on partial weight-bearing strings, which would account for other syllables as well. The question will not be addressed in detail here.

Please join us at 3:30 in 571 EPB for refreshments.