MSCs in Positional Neutralization: The Problem of Gapped Inventories
Maria Gouskova
March 2023 

Do inputs need to be restricted on a language-specific basis? Classic OT claims that they do not: the rich base is filtered by constraints that yield full contrast, complementary distributions, or positional neutralization depending on the ranking. The problem arises when positional neutralization affects a gappy contrast. In Russian, voicing neutralization works on all obstruents alike, including non-contrastively voiceless ones—but it creates voiced allophones that are otherwise disallowed. In the popular OT account of positional neutralization, analyzing these cases requires handling voicing twice: once for all segments, then again for gaps. I argue that the solution is to relax the rich base assumption by ruling gaps out at the UR level via Morpheme Structure Constraints (Halle 1959 et seq.).

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007195 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Phonology
keywords:	positional faithfulness, russian, voicing, nasal place assimilation, oromo, loanwords, affricates, phonology
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