Southern Pomo syncope is metrically conditioned: Metrical opacity and stratal derivation

Max J Kaplan

doi:10.3765/plsa.v5i1.4736

Abstract

Southern Pomo displays a process of rhythmic vowel deletion that appears to be sensitive to a metrical structure that is incompatible with surface stress, and is thus metrically opaque. This pattern implicates a metrical reversal, which is best accounted for by re-ranking constraints at different derivational stages in Stratal OT. The first stratum defines weak positions by building structure from left to right, while the second stratum deletes vowels in those weak positions and reassigns prominence from right to left. Some prior work has asserted that stratal models of rhythmic phonotactics overgenerate, making typologically strange predictions. This literature has argued that cases like Southern Pomo should instead be analyzed in surface-oriented, parallel systems. This paper demonstrates that Southern Pomo syncope cannot be generated in parallel, nor in derivational frameworks that are more restrictive, i.e. Harmonic Serialism. This work suggests strata are necessary, with further evidence coming from phrasal and word-internal processes, and diachronic change.

Highlights

There are many well-attested phonological processes across the world's languages that may result in opaque generalizations
I have shown that Southern Pomo demonstrates a pattern of rhythmic vowel deletion which is not predictable from the surface metrical structure
Syncope and stress assignment seem to be evaluated over different rhythmic structures, with syncope aligned with the left edge, and stress with the right edge

Summary

Introduction

There are many well-attested phonological processes across the world's languages that may result in opaque generalizations. Syncope in Southern Pomo exhibits both kinds of opacity discussed above: there is apparent underapplication, in that unstressed vowels appear on the surface, as well as misapplication, because it appears that for forms with even syllable parity, strong positions have undergone deletion. Stratum II syncope and stress realignment for odd parity In these tableaux, we can see that TROUGH-R successfully reverses the direction in which metrical structure is built, *Vpropels deletion in weak syllables, and MAX-σprevents deletion from occurring in syllables which were stressed in the input. I have demonstrated that the data in Southern Pomo are generable using a two-stage derivation in SOT The first of these strata defines weak positions from the left edge, and the second stratum deletes vowels in these positions and re-assigns prominence from the right edge. A first stratum could reduce all vowels in weak positions to schwa, and realignment of metrical structure in a subsequent stratum could produce a language where all and only schwa is stressed:

Stratum I Stratum II

Findings

Discussion and conclusion