Zero morphology and constraint interaction: subtraction and 	epenthesis in German dialects
                ROA-100         (17pp.)
                zeromorph.ps, --.rtf, --.word
                Chris Golston & Richard Wiese
                Heinrich-Heine-Universitaet Duesseldorf                 golston@ling.uni-duesseldorf.de 
		wiese@ling.uni-duesseldorf.de
This paper investigates what looks like a case of subtractive plural morphology in Hessian German, illustrated in (1).
(1)    Singular           Plural
       hond               hon     'dog'
       dog                do      'day'
We argue that subtractive pluralization is best understood as a response to a number of conflicting constraints on phonological and morphological wellformedness in Hessian. Crucially, we show that each of these constraints is operative in Standard German as well, where no subtractive morphology is found. We propose that these two dialects (Hessian and Standard) differ not in terms of the rules they have or even in the constraints they have; rather, that they differ only as to the relative ranking of constraints. We assume the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolenksy 1993), according to which the phonologies of distinct languages differ only as to the ranking of a universal set of violable constraints. We take mutually intelligible dialects to be the ideal place to test OT since the effects of ranking are best seen where there is a large amount of shared phonology and morphology.
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