The Syllable in Optimality Theory (review)

This book contains 14 thematic chapters addressing various syllable-related issues from an Optimality Theory (OT) perspective, as well as an introductory overview. As the limitations of this forum preclude an exhaustive discussion of each analysis, I shall instead briefly outline the contents of the volume and then offer some general discussion.

The first section consists of an introductory "Overview" by the editors. This chapter first sketches the role of the syllable in phonology and then examines its treatment within OT. The editors suggest that OT is particularly well-suited to capture the typology of the syllable (a claim accepted even by some opponents of OT, e.g., McMahon 2000). An overview of the contents of the book is then given.

The second part, "Syllable Structure and Prosodic Structure", contains four papers. John J. McCarthy's "Sympathy, cumulativity, and the Duke-of-York gambit" examines Duke-of-York (DY) derivations (Pullum 1976), that is, derivations which "have the general form A → B → A, where underlying A passes through a B stage before returning to surface A again" (p. 24), within OT. McCarthy argues that there are two different types of such derivations, "vacuous" and "feeding"; in the first type, the B stage is motivated solely by "theory-internal assumptions of strict serialism" (p. 24), while in the second type, the B stage is "crucial for conditioning some further process" (p. 24). McCarthy reviews the evidence for a number of vacuous DY derivations, and concludes that such derivations are not problematic for OT, as they are "an expected consequence of the core premises of OT, constraint ranking and constraint violation under domination" (p. 32). As to feeding DY derivations, McCarthy contends that they do not exist, and that better analyses are available for any putative feeding DY derivations. In McCarthy's view, the problem of opacity in OT is best resolved by means of Sympathy Theory (McCarthy 1999), and the chapter concludes with an eloquent review of the applications of Sympathy Theory to opacity. The second paper in this section is "The Controversy over Geminates and Syllable Weight", by Stuart Davis, which takes up the problem of the representation of geminate consonants: are they consonants that are underlyingly moraic, or consonants underlyingly linked to two root nodes, or consonants linked to two skeletal slots? Based largely on the behaviour of geminates in Sinhala, Davis argues that geminates are underlyingly moraic, and suggests that alternative views of geminates fail to account for the Sinhalese material. Davis then discusses evidence from other languages, which has been raised in support of alternative views of geminates, and he concludes that this evidence does not in fact conclusively support alternative views. The next paper in this section is "The syllable as a unit of prosodic organization in Japanese", by Haruo Kubozono. While Japanese is normally considered a mora language, rather than a syllable language, Kubozono argues persuasively that a number of phonological phenomena in Japanese, including mother-child language, emphatic mimetics, and the truncation of loanwords, can best be accounted for in terms of the syllable. Kubozono therefore concludes that "the syllable is no less indispensable than the mora is in Japanese" (p. 118). The final paper in this section is "Prosodic weight", by Draga Zec, which takes up the problem of describing syllable weight. Zec argues that "syllable weight in terms of mora count is the sole weight mechanism associated with the syllable as a prosodic constituent" (p. 123), but that higher level prosodic constituents like the foot and the prosodic word can "impose their own minimal sonority thresholds" (p. 124). Data from English, Mordvin, Old Church Slavonic, and Asheninca are adduced in support of Zec's claims.

The third part, "Nonmoraic syllables and syllable edges", begins with Paul Kiparsky's "Syllables and moras in Arabic"; a more extensive treatment of this data can be found in Kiparsky (forthcoming). This chapter focuses on syllable-based phenomena in three groups of Arabic dialects (VC-dialects, C-dialects, and CV...