| Abstract: | This paper investigates exceptions to phonological regularities at the right edge of words. I will concentrate on two phenomena, regressive vowel harmony and its motivation, and the phonotactics of consonants at right word edges in languages where these are exceptional to word-internal coda consonants. Exceptional final consonants gave rise to theories of minor syllables with empty nuclei. This view is challenged in this paper. The left-right asymmetry within morphology and phonology has been addressed by Bye and de Lacy (2000). Within the framework of Optimality Theory they conclude that, given the asymmetries in affixation and stress placement we find cross-linguistically, we should exclude constraints referring to right edges from the universal constraint inventory. The current study shows that this strong hypothesis is not tenable and replaces it by a more general cognitive meta-constraint, which captures left-edge tendencies as emerging from a general lexical~functional asymmetry. |
