ROA: | 242 |
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Title: | Noun faithfulness: On the privileged behavior of nouns in phonology |
Authors: | Jennifer L. Smith |
Comment: | approximately 30 pages |
Length: | 30 |
Abstract: | Noun faithfulness: On the privileged behavior of nouns in phonology Jennifer L. Smith University of Massachusetts jlsmith@linguist.umass.edu May 21, 1997 In a number of languages, nouns show more phonological contrasts than words of other categories. In line with work on domain-specific faithfulness (positional faithfulness), I propose that the universal constraint set includes noun- faithfulness constraints (NF): domain-specific faithfulness constraints for the lexical category noun. A language in which only nouns license a certain phonological contrast can then be accounted for with the ranking NF >> M >> F. This paper gives initial motivation for noun-faithfulness constraints from accent phenomena in dialects of Japanese, with specific examples from Miyakonojo, Kagoshima, Tokyo, Hirosaki, and Hakata. Then, word-stress assignment in Tuyuca is examined; what appears to be an example of phonological privilege for verbs is reanalyzed as a case of suffix dominance that is itself a noun-faithfulness effect. The paper concludes with a discussion of findings from psycholinguistics and language acquisition that indicate that the category noun has special cognitive salience. |
Type: | Paper/tech report |
Area/Keywords: | |
Article: | Version 1 |