The Prosody-Morphology Interface (review)

This book consists of ten of the sixteen papers presented at a workshop on prosodic morphology held in 1994 at Utrecht University, along with a brief introductory chapter, written by two of the three editors. There are also indexes of subjects, constraints, languages, and names. All of the studies are couched within the optimality theory (OT) framework.

The book begins with a chapter by René Kager and Wim Zonneveld, ‘Introduction’ (1–38), which reviews the history of prosodic morphology, introduces optimality theory, and then presents brief summaries of the other papers. This chapter is a useful, albeit somewhat terse, introduction to prosodic morphology, optimality theory, and the other papers.

In his contribution, ‘On the moraic representation of underlying geminates: Evidence from prosodic morphology’ (39–61), Stuart Davis points out that the claim that geminate consonants are underlyingly moraic predicts that, in languages which do not assign moras to coda consonants, CVG syllables (i.e. syllables closed by a geminate consonant), and CVV syllables should be bimoraic, while CVC and CV syllables should be monomoraic. It has been claimed that such languages do not in fact exist; Davis argues that they do and draws evidence from a number of languages, including Hausa and Korean, to support his assertion.

The longest paper in the volume, and the one that should probably be read first, as most of the other papers refer to it, is ‘Faithfulness and identity in prosodic morphology’ (218–309) by John J. McCarthy and Alan S. Prince. After a brief discussion of earlier versions of prosodic morphology, McCarthy and Prince sketch the principles of correspondence theory, including its relationship to earlier models of optimality theory. They then examine the interaction of reduplication and the phonological component of the grammar, drawing evidence from languages that exhibit reduplicative morphology where processes either ‘overapply’ (i.e. apply in both the base and the reduplicant when they are only expected in either the base or reduplicant) or ‘underapply’ (i.e. are present in neither the base nor the reduplicant, even if they are expected). They argue that these developments can be more easily accounted for within OT than within derivational frameworks.

Junko Itô and R. Armin Mester contend, in their contribution, ‘Realignment’ (188–217), that syllabification results from alignment constraints. For instance, they claim that the coda condition, which constrains the types of consonants that can occupy syllable codas, can be replaced by an alignment constraint requiring that the left edge of a consonant be aligned with the left edge of a syllable. They discuss the case of Bedouin Arabic and Biblical Hebrew, both of which ban pharyngeal consonants from syllable codas. While earlier work has formalized this by means of the coda condition, Itô and Mester argue that this is better accounted for by an alignment constraint which requires pharyngeal consonants to be aligned with the left edges of syllables. Other issues discussed in this paper include the role of sonority and the question of crisp edges.

My major reservation about the book concerns the long delay in publication, especially given the number of changes that have taken place in OT since the conference. One wishes also that the conference discussions had been included. Despite these objections, however, this remains a useful and valuable book.