| Abstract: | Avoidance of adjacent similar segments is argued here to be the result of a constraint against adjacent identical (long) segments in cooperation with other active constraints as opposed to, for example, the direct result of some constraint against adjacent similar segments. The crux of this Cooperative Interaction hypothesis is the crucial dependence of partial identity avoidance on other aspects of the grammar of the language in question; the fact that a constraint other than the one penalizing long segments must be active has consequences that are independently verified in case studies from English and Chicano Spanish. |
