This paper documents a restriction against the co-occurrence of homorganic consonants in the root morphemes of Muna, a western Austronesian language, and compares the Muna pattern with the much-studied similar pattern in Arabic. As in ...

Optimality Theory (OT) is a model of language that combines aspects of generative and connectionist linguistics. It is unique in the field in its use of a rank ordering on constraints, which is used to ...

Morphemes often behave differently phonologically in ways that cannot be explained purely phonologically: one morpheme undergoes or triggers a process while another morpheme fails to undergo or trigger that process, even though the two are ...

Phonological alternations often serve to modify forms so that they respect a phonotacticrestriction that applies across the words of language. Although it has long been assumed thatan adequate theory of phonology should capture the connection ...

Phonological processes and structures are often limited to a particular set of a language’s words, such as loanwords, Latinate words in English, or Yamato words in Japanese. Typically, the etymologically older, or “core” set of ...

When children reduce onset clusters to singletons, a common pattern is for the least sonorous member of the adult cluster to be produced. Within OPTIMALITYTHEORY (Prince & Smolensky, 1993), this pattern has been accounted for ...