Glottalization and Lenition in Nuu-chah-nulth

This article examines glottalization and lenition in Nuu-chah-nulth. These processes involve features introduced via affixation, features that are sometimes compatible with the final segment of the stem and sometimes incompatible. An understanding of the intricacies of these patterns requires a focus on featural representations, with lexical representations involving floating features and variable specifications for features. Both of these properties follow from the postulation of a rich base, with features freely combining in inputs. The analysis argues for covert features, for constraints holding more strongly in small domains than large domains, and for the importance of a markedness scale on glottalizability.