Licensing constraints in phonology

Abstract

In this article I firstly propose a general framework for formulating interconstituent relations that either ‘license’ or ‘govern’ the occurrence of empty-headed or branching constituents. The Government Phonology literature has put forth a variety of such relations, with different terminology being used by different authors. Here I suggest that the common function of all these inter-constituent relations (which I simply all call interconstituent licensing constraints) is to control the distribution of ‘marked’ syllabic constituents (onsets and rhymes), where by ‘marked’ I refer to constituents that are empty (−1) or branching (+1), both deviating from the unmarked constituent that contains exactly one (1) segment. Allowing for some parametric variation, I show that each marked constituent must be licensed by the immediate following constituent as well as by the following constituent of the same type on the relevant projection: . In all cases the licensor (to the right of the arrow; all relations are right-headed) cannot be empty-headed. Since the licensees are either empty-headed or branching, we arrive at eight types of licensing constraints. The discussion shows that of these eight, relations in which the licensee is an O, especially a branching O, are the least needed. The discussion of interconstituent licensing constraints is concluded by a brief discussion of long vowels (argued to be sequences of two rhymes, the second of which is empty) and a brief discussion of how cross-linguistic differences in the applicability of interconstituent licensing constraints should be handled. A tentative proposal is that OT-style ranking can be understood as a case of dependency relations between licensing constraints. Secondly, this article will propose a framework for edge licensing constraints, that is constraints that license the occurrence of marked, especially empty-headed rhymes at the left and right edge of words. A tentative proposal involves the idea that such rhymes, rather than being empty, contain an ‘anti-element’.