Idiosyncratic Hiatus Resolution: An Argument for Gradient Harmonic Grammar
Brian Hsu, Caitlin Smith
January 2023 

This paper discusses implications for generative theories of phonological idiosyncrasy, based on two vowel reduction patterns exhibited in Palauan. First, the process involves multiple degrees of idiosyncrasy; in cases of stress shift, stem vowels may surface faithfully, reduce to some unpredictable degree, or delete entirely. Second, the process involves idiosyncrasy in the patterning of adjacent tautomorphemic vowels with respect to hiatus resolution. We show that Palauan vowel reduction and hiatus resolution receive a parsimonious analysis in Gradient Harmonic Grammar (Smolensky & Goldrick 2016), a weighted constraint system in which individual segments and features are specified for non-integer degrees of activity (i.e. presence) in input forms. By proposing that vowels in Palauan may be specified for distinct input activity values, we are able to capture the idiosyncratic patterning of individual vowels within these two processes. We show that these patterns are challenging for alternative approaches that rely on morpheme-level diacritics or indices to generate phonological idiosyncrasy (Pater 2000; Coetzee & Pater 2011; Sande et al. 2020).

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007088 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of the 2022 Annual Meeting on Phonology. https://doi.org/10.3765/amp.v10i0.5459
keywords:	gradient harmonic grammar; phonological idiosyncrasy; hiatus resolution; palauan; vowel reduction, phonology
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