| Comment: | Appeared originally in 1995 in Jill N. Beckman, Laura Walsh Dickey, & Suzanne Urbanczyk (eds.), Papers in Optimality Theory, University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers 18, pp. 21-51, Amherst, MA: GLSA. |
| Abstract: | This paper presents an OT analysis of an apparent challenge to parallelist OT, namely the interaction between stress and epenthesis in Winnebago (AKA Hocank, Mississippi Valley Siouan). The analysis is built upon two core analytical assumptions, which, taken together, explain the nature of stress-epenthesis interaction without serial derivation. The first assumption is that the Winnebago foot is a moraic trochee, an assumption that is shown to account for initial extrametricality, stress in reduplicated forms, and a non-automatic process of stem shortening. The second assumption has to do with the syllable structure resulting from Dorsey’s Law epenthesis, a process that breaks up voiceless obstruent + sonorant sequences by inserting a copy of the following vowel, i.e., /OSV/-->OVSV. Drawing on phonetic evidence, reduplicative templates, and phonotactic restrictions, it is argued that the output of Dorsey’s Law, OVSV, patterns with heavy syllables, so it must be syllabified as such. These independently motivated assumptions are then shown to straightforwardly account for the apparent exceptions in word accent caused by Dorsey’s Law epenthesis, without recourse to the derivational assumptions typical of prior analyses. |
