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Book: Layering and Directionality

Chapter: Accent Windows

DOI: 10.1558/equinox.25112

Blurb:

Chapter 6 presents the Relation-Specific Alignment (Hyde 2012a) approach to trisyllabic and other accent windows and demonstrates that it provides a general account of the phenomenon where alternative proposals do not. Having examined the predictions that arise under the different approaches to prosodic layering in Chapters 3-5, Chapter 6 returns to the Relation-Specific Alignment formulation, introduced in Chapter 2, and to an unexpected result that emerges in the context of opposite-edge alignment. Like its same-edge counterparts, Relation-Specific Alignment’s opposite-edge constraints avoid the difficulties that emerge under Generalized Alignment (McCarthy and Prince 1993). In the opposite-edge case, however, the remedy has some surprising consequences. Opposite-edge constraints have the effect of confining instances of one of the aligned categories to a ‘window’ at an edge of a form established by an instance of the other aligned category. The opposite-edge effect provides a simple, general account of trisyllabic accent windows and other types of windows. While alternatives such as extended lapse avoidance (Gordon 2002, Kager 2005), weak local parsing (Kager 1994, Green 1995, Green and Kenstowicz 1995) and non-finality (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004) provide effective analyses in some cases, they do not provide analyses for the range of windows accommodated under Relation-Specific Alignment. Topic include: 6.1 A General Approach to Trisyllabic Windows; 6.2 Full Windows; 6.3 Truncated Windows; 6.4 A Morphology-Based Window; 6.5 Summary

Chapter Contributors

  • Brett Hyde (bhyde@artsci.wustl.edu - book-auth-701) 'Washington University in St. Louis'