Identity avoidance and constraint interaction: the case of Cantonese

Abstract

This paper explores various phenomena of identity avoidance in Cantonese and argues that both pausing and omission play a significant role in avoiding identity of elements. The descriptive generalization is that in Cantonese if two adjacent morphemes are phonologically identical, add a pause between the two morphemes to rephrase the intonational phrase if possible to avoid the repetition. If pausing is impossible, don't do anything and just tolerate the identity. If two adjacent homophonous morphemes belong to the same type of functional category, then omit one of the homophonous morphemes. Both phonological information and morphological information are needed to calculate the violation of identity.

Universal grammar provides an output constraint against phonological repetition of elements in natural language. Under the optimality-theoretical approach, violations of such a constraint may be tolerable to satisfy some higher-ranked constraints. Omission is regarded as a last-resort strategy of identity avoidance.

A harmonic scale of haplology in natural languages can be derived from the findings of this paper: omission of functional morphemes is more harmonic than omission of lexical morphemes. It is conjectured that the harmonic scale should be universal.