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ROA:242
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