| ROA: | 175 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Dissimilation as Local Conjunction |
| Authors: | John Alderete |
| Comment: | In Kiyomi Kusumoto (ed.), Proceedings of North East Linguistics Society 27, pp., 17-31, Amherst, MA: GLSA. |
| Length: | 15 |
| Abstract: | While the OCP has been an essential tool in describing the distribution of phonological features, a fundamental problem arises when it is applied to the analysis of dissimilation processes and segmental cooccurrence restrictions. Such phenomena typically rule out more than one *marked* element in a domain; but the OCP says nothing about the markedness of the elements involved. To account for the correlation between activity in a process and the markedness of target and trigger, adjunct theories of feature specification are required, but these theories have been shown to have many unsatisfactory consequences, essentially because unmarked features can be active in ways that do not involve the OCP. In this paper, the problem of correctly correlating phonological activity and markedness is handled with the following proposal: dissimilation results from the force of markedness constraints, self-conjoined in a local context. Because of the role of markedness in the proposal, the correlation between activity in a process and the markedness of target and trigger is directly explained, as in Smolensky 1993. Further, the approach to dissimilation as local self-conjunction resolves two additional problems identified for the traditional verison of the OCP. First, the proposal straightforwardly generalizes to cases of dissimilation which are not represented in autosegmental phonology. Second, dissimilation as local conjunction provides a natural account of the inactivity of coronals in Place cooccurrence restrictions: the analysis stems from the equation, marked segments = active segments; because coronals are unmarked relative to a harmony scale, they are inactive in dissimilation. N.B.: the supplementary material is the handout to a talk given at the Rutgers/UMass Joint Class Meeting II (UMass-Amherst, May 1996). Beyond the central ideas developed in the NELS paper, it gives a formalization of a set of locality relations necessary for non-constituent-based locality requirements, an analysis of vowel dissimilation in Woleaian and Arusa, and a discussion of the formal parallels between dissimilation and assimilation. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | Phonology |
| Article: | Part 1 Part 2 |