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.