Editors' Note

Editors' Note for the Proceedings of the 2020 Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2020), held at the University of California, Santa Cruz in September 2020.

Against the Law of Three Consonants in French: Evidence from Judgment Data

Grammont's Law of Three Consonants (LTC) states that French schwa is obligatorily pronounced in any CC_C sequence to avoid three-consonant clusters. Although schwa presence has been shown to be sensitive not only to cluster size but also to the nature of consonants in post-lexical phonology, the LTC is still considered as accurate to describe schwa-zero alternations in lexical phonology. The paper uses judgment data from French speakers in France and Switzerland to compare the behavior of schwa in derived words (lexical phonology) and inflected words (post-lexical phonology). The results show that schwa-zero alternations are conditioned not only by cluster size but also by cluster type in lexical phonology. Moreover, the same phonotactic asymmetries among consonant clusters are found in lexical and post-lexical phonologies. The data therefore support a weaker version of the lexical-phonology hypothesis than what is usually assumed for French. Lexical and post-lexical phonologies do not require different phonotactic constraints but only different weights for the same constraints.

Arguments for a Privative L Tone in Northern Tepehuan

This paper proposes that Northern Tepehuan is a tonal language with just one lexical tone 'low tone' and is therefore a privative tonal system. L tone is sufficient to explain the pitch contrasts in the language and also necessary to explain the "inconsistencies" of stress assignment. Stress is normally predictable from the size of the word, from syllable-weight, and is cued by a H* intonational tone. Nonetheless, in words that do not obey the Stress-to-Weight constraint, it could be argued that stress is displaced from the heavy syllable by virtue of a high-ranked *Align(Head/Low) constraint that prohibits the placement of stress on a syllable with a lexical L. The L tone also explains why the H* intonational tone can be displaced from stressed syllables.

Articulatory Strategies for Place Contrasts of Unreleased Final Stops on Preceding Vowels: Evidence from Ultrasound Imaging

This ultrasound study examines the gestural coordination involved in vowel-to-consonant sequences concerning unreleased final stops, which are more susceptible to reduction than their released counterparts. Thus, coarticulatory information on the preceding vowel is important to signal place contrasts of post-vocalic stops. The gestural coordination of vowel-consonant sequences of monosyllabic words in Cantonese represents a testing case for having preserved phonemic contrasts of six unreleased final stops in a range of vowel contexts. Preliminary results from smoothing spline ANOVA and linear mixed-effect regression show that coarticulatory patterns depend on vowel height, that is, non-high vowels are undergoing gradual coarticulation whereas high vowels are phonologising the lingual properties of the unreleased final stops on the preceding vowels.

Variable Hiatus in Persian is Affected by Suffix Length

In this paper, we conduct two experiments to examine variable hiatus in Spoken Persian. The production experiment reveals that variation is restricted. For instance, elision of the first vowel, which is cross-linguistically common (Casali 1997), is never attested. Moreover, elision of the second vowel is rare with monosegmental (-V) suffixes. The perception experiment confirms that elision of the second vowel is preferred with polysegmental suffixes, but rare with monosegmental suffixes, where hiatus is favoured instead. The preference of hiatus over epenthesis remains constant regardless of suffix length. This study contributes to the discussion of variable phonological processes and constitutes the first experimentally confirmed case of variable hiatus to date.

OCP Avoidance in Classical Chinese: Implications for Tonogenesis

Through a corpus of five pre-Qin (before 221 BCE) texts, this paper argues that the authors of both prose and poetry in Classical Chinese were sensitive to OCP violations at cross-word boundaries, and changed diction and used marked word order as a way to avoid the creation of pseudogeminates across words. The frequency of bigrams which result in pseudogeminates are compared to the predicted frequency of pseudogeminates across the corpus. This paper finds that pseudogeminates are significantly (p<0.00001) rarer than expected through randomization. Furthermore, by analyzing these texts with multiple possible phonological reconstructions, this paper suggests that post-codas, segments which were present in Old Chinese, but were elided during the process of tonogenesis between Old Chinese and Middle Chinese, were most likely present in the Chinese of the writers of the texts. Evidence comes from the consistency of OCP avoidance across all tones of Chinese assuming the presence of post-codas, and the lack of consistency thereof when post-codas are not assumed.

North Germanic Tonal Accent is Equipollent and Metrical: Evidence from Compounding

For the North Germanic opposition between two tonal accents, it has been claimed that Accent 2 has a lexical tone, that Accent 1 has a lexical tone, that both accents are marked tonally in the lexicon, or that the accent opposition is based on two types of feet. Based on evidence from compounding, we argue that the opposition between Accent 1 and Accent 2 is equipollent, and that this is best expressed in a foot-based approach since each lexical item will necessarily receive a foot. Elaborating on previous metrical work on tonal accent, we assume that binary feet can be built on moras (= Accent 1) or syllables (= Accent 2) and show how this successfully captures compound accentuation in Central Swedish and Urban East Norwegian. Our foot-based analysis is in line with recent work on tonal accent that calls into question the claim that all tonal contrasts within syllables must be due to the presence of lexical tone. In addition, our analysis addresses issues surrounding the phonology of compounds in general, and prosodic effects of compounding in particular.

Morpheme-specific Phonology in Reduplication

This paper examines two case studies of morpheme-specific reduplication that copy from a syntactic domain larger than a root but smaller than a word, providing an analysis in Cophonologies by Phase (CBP) of both morpheme-specific phonotactic requirements in different reduplication processes and of the amount of structure copied in reduplication. The first case study comes from Guébie (Kru, Ivory Coast), where reduplication marks both nominalization and reciprocals (among others). In both morphosyntactic environments, reduplication copies the verb plus valency-changing affixes, but the reduplicants are subject to different sets of phonotactic restrictions. The second case study comes from Kinande (Bantu, Democratic Republic of Congo) where there is reduplication of nouns as well as verbs. Nominal and verbal reduplication both involve a two-syllable reduplicant that copies from the root plus some--but not all--affixes, and both are subject to a morpheme integrity constraint. However, the two reduplication processes differ in whether they are prefixing or suffixing, whether they copy from right-to-left or left-to-right, and in which repair to the morpheme integrity constraint is preferred.While other frameworks such as traditional Cophonology Theory, Stratal OT, or Indexed Constraints could also account for the morpheme-specific phonological behavior of reduplicants, CBP has the added benefit of straightforwardly accounting for the amount of structure that serves as the base of reduplication in each case. This paper contributes to the growing literature on morphophonological interactions that can be accounted for within CBP.

Learning French Liaison with Gradient Symbolic Representations: Errors, Predictions, Consequences

Smolensky & Goldrick (2016) first made the case for Gradient Symbolic Representations (GSRs) as the inputs to phonological grammar using the phenomena of French liaison. Under this view, many common French words are stored underlyingly with partially-activated word-final consonants, and others with gradient blends of partially-activated word-initial consonants. In this paper, we follow up some of that view's predictions and consequences, focusing on the acquisition of French liaison using GSRs. We compare our simulations of error-driven GSR learning with observed errors made by French-learning children, and find the results to be encouragingly similar. We also compare predictions about the end state of GSR learning with a pilot study reporting adult French speakers' use of liaison in nonce words, where we find a rather less good explanatory fit. The paper emphasizes the role of word and collocation frequency in the development of phonological patterns by a GSR learner, and outlines many future avenues for research.

Binarity in Prosodic Morphology and Elsewhere

This paper explores the role of binarity in prosodic morphology by proposing that all representations are maximally binary branching, as stated in (1).(1) Binarity Hypothesis: All representations are maximally binary branching.Our evidence comes from examining patterns in which fission (Integrity violations) and fusion (Uniformity violations) of segments satisfies morphological and phonological constraints: multiple reduplication, haplology, coalescence, and breaking. Where there appears to be 1:3 or a 3:1 mapping between input and output segments, we propose that this must arise from two separate 1:2 or 2:1 mappings (perhaps at a stem and word level). We illustrate that a number of seemingly complex patterns of multiple reduplication in Salish, Wakashan and Uto-Aztecan languages follow naturally from the Binarity Hypothesis.