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  • Opaque Allomorph Selection in Japanese and Harmonic Serialism:A Reply to Kurisu 2012
  • Erin Hall, Peter Jurgec, and Shigeto Kawahara

1 Introduction

Crosslinguistically, medial consonant clusters simplify by deleting or assimilating the first consonant /VpkV/ → [VkV] ~ [VkkV], never the second *[VpV] ~ *[VppV] (Steriade 2001, 2001/2008). Wilson (2000, 2001) demonstrates that this generalization holds in a number of different languages including Basque, Carib, Tunica, Diola-Fogny, and West Greenlandic. Parallel Optimality Theory (OT) fails to capture this asymmetry, as the output consonant appears in the onset regardless of its position in the input. McCarthy (2007, 2008) proposes a solution to this problem within Harmonic Serialism (HS), by postulating that deletion of the onset—that is, the second consonant—involves a step that is not harmonically improving. The prediction that onset consonants in clusters never delete has been recognized as one of the crucial arguments for HS compared to parallel OT.

Kurisu (2012) challenges this generalization by bringing forth data from Japanese where onsets, not codas, appear to be deleted, presenting a problem for a two-step analysis in HS (section 2). This squib takes a second look at the Japanese data by considering the full verbal paradigm (section 3). The evidence suggests that the Japanese verbal paradigm pattern involves allomorph selection, not pure phono-logical deletion. Next, we show that allomorph selection opaquely interacts with another process, w-deletion, which is phonological. HS can model this opaque interaction (section 4). In contrast, parallel OT cannot account for counterbleeding opacity at all (section 5). Thus, Japanese does not challenge the generalization that onsets never delete in consonant cluster simplification; instead, it in fact provides further support for HS. [End Page 599]

2 Japanese Verb Suffixation and Deletion

Japanese verb suffixes sometimes surface with an initial coronal consonant (1). The generalization is that vowel-final stems are followed by a coronal in the suffix, whereas consonant-final stems are followed by vowel-initial suffixes.

(1) Japanese verbs (Kurisu 2012:311)

Kurisu (2012) argues that underlying suffix-initial coronals are deleted when preceded by another consonant.1 This deletion occurs because of a phonotactic restriction of Japanese: codas cannot have their own place specification. In OT, coronal deletion is driven by CODACOND-(ITION) (Ito 1988, 1989, Goldsmith 1990, Ito and Mester 1998, 2003). Furthermore, root segments are more faithful than suffix segments (MAXRoot ≫ MAXAffix; McCarthy and Prince 1995, Beckman 1998). In parallel OT, CODACOND can be satisfied by deletion of the second consonant, which would have been the onset in the output (2).

(2) Kurisu's parallel OT analysis

As Kurisu (2012) points out, this analysis cannot be implemented in HS. HS is a variant of OT that combines constraint ranking with derivations (McCarthy 2010a,b, 2016). Gen in HS generates only candidates that differ from the input by a single operation. The winning candidate is then fed back to Gen as an input for another round of evaluation. This loop is repeated until the fully faithful parse of the latest input wins.

Deletion is considered to be a two-step process in HS: first place features are removed, then segments are deleted (McCarthy 2007, 2008). Thus, at step 1 a segment can only be debuccalized, not entirely deleted (3). The resulting segment is a consonant without a place feature, henceforth marked H. The problem for the HS analysis is that the placeless onset candidate (3a) should win at this step, but it does [End Page 600] not ("☺" marks an intended winner, which does not win given the constraint ranking). In fact, candidate (3a) is harmonically bounded by both the placeless coda candidate (3b), which wins in this case, and the faithful candidate (3c).

(3) Step 1: Placeless onset is harmonically bounded

Kurisu (2012) thus concludes that the Japanese challenge can only be resolved if consonant deletion is a possible single-step operation, contra McCarthy (2007, 2008), who posits a principled restriction on onset deletion in consonant clusters. However, if deletion is a possible single-step operation, then HS cannot explain the coda/onset asymmetry, which holds across many languages (Steriade 2001, Wilson 2001). We will now reexamine this problem, and we will conclude that the data challenge neither the descriptive...

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