Abstract
This study deals with trisyllabic shortening occurring in derived words in English. This process has traditionally been argued that a vowel with two moras in the third syllable from the right edge gets shortened by relevant ordered rules. Myers (1987) assumed extrametricality and vowel shortening in trisyllabic position, resulting from the attachment of morphological unit at the end of a stem. Unlike rule-based analyses, it is argued in the study that a long vowel in the third syllable from the right edge of the derived words becomes short in order to form a better trochaic or dactylic foot, which is required by relevant constraints such as Parse-σ, WSP, Foot-Binarity, and *Lapse-μ. Thus, the constraint-based account proposed in the study does not have to resort to the ideas such as extrametricality. This is because a long vowel should become short to reduce the number of mora in a foot, being harmonic for an optimal foot structure and eliminating unlicensed weak moras after a stressed mora. The proposed account can also be extended to other cases of vowel shortening in English, which have been considered to show an exceptional behavior of vowel change in derivation in English.
Published Version
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