Modern Greek accent and faithfulness constraints in OT

Abstract

In Modern Greek nominals, the accent is sometimes faithful to the properties of stems, and sometimes to those of affixes. Several facts challenge solutions based on stipulating the ranking of faithfulness constraints in OT, however. These include the fact that accentual dominance of affixes correlates with their semantic markedness (marked Case; marked number); the fact that neighboring cells within a paradigm tend to be accentually uniform; and the fact that control of accent shifts from affix to stem when stems are followed by Class Markers. These facts are argued to motivate an approach in which faithfulness effects and their relative magnitudes are not primitive notions, but are rather derived in certain specific ways that take account of both the internal structure of representations and their overall distance in space.