Volume 23, Issue 4

The present theme issue contains four articles that use or discuss the framework of Government Phonology, originally formulated in two seminal articles by Jonathan Kaye, Jean Lowenstamm and Jean-Roger Vergnaud. Government Phonology (GP) has been in the arena of phonological theories since the mid eighties, sharing a number of important characteristics with Dependency Phonology, a model developed by John Anderson and various others, notably Colin Ewen. As explained in van der Hulst's article (where one can find a more detailed discussion and references), both models arose from the desire to abandon or replace aspects of the SPE-model of phonology with alternatives that were claimed to be more restricted in a variety of ways. At the same time, Government Phonology maintained the original mentalistic bias of the generative approach to the language faculty, thus trying to characterize the innate apparatus that children bring to bear on the acquisition of phonology.

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’.

This article attempts to present an account of non-derived words in Georgian that exhibit initial consonant sequences of up to six members. The approach is in the framework of Head-Driven Phonology , in which phonological representations are considered to be cognitive representations involving computational processes that rely upon head/dependent relations but are not necessarily direct representations of phonetic surface forms. These head/dependent relations account for (a) the structure of phonological forms, (b) the melodic content permitted to occur in certain positions, and (c) the interpretation of certain phonological objects for surface realization. Two specific relational types, namely, proper government (a relation holding between nuclei) and inter-onset government (a relation holding between onsets) are relations which are triggered due to the defective content of one of these constituent types. With nuclei, it is the absence of melodic material, hence ‘empty nucleus’, and with onsets, it is the presence of the (v) element, indicating absence of resonance material for the consonantal object. Such absence of material, or emptiness, requires a stronger neighboring object on its projection to legitimize or license its existence to remain. These two licensing relations are shown to work in combination with one another in Georgian to yield the surface effect of two-member harmonic clusters preceded or followed by a third consonant. Lastly, a third type of head/dependent licensing relation ( inter-onset licensing ) is appealed to in order to account for the effect that one onset head (be it of a domain or single constituent) has on the structural governing abilities of another and upon the melodic content permitted within that dependent onset.

In this article several aspects of Turkish phonology, including k-zero, vowel-zero and vowel length alternations, are analyzed using a four-position template. The inaudibility of a template-final position is attributed to its weakness within the hierarchical structure of the template. There is historical evidence for loss of melody and wearing down of template edges to the extent that some initial and final consonant slots are missing from the structure, making the origins of many words unrecognizable. Nevertheless, the template remains an active constituent in word formation, playing its part as a parsing cue and in accommodating loan words into the phonology of the language. Although it frequently coincides with a morphological domain, the template is a constituent not unlike a syllable.

The aim of the Lateral Theory of Phonology (LTP) is to build a system of principled organization of speech sounds against the backdrop of the CVCV assumption stipulating that the phonological structure is based on a strict consecution of C and V positions. It would appear that the phonological machinery that would have to operate on this abstract backdrop to derive the required concrete effects can be all but simple. Scheer's unquestionable contribution to the theory of representations is that he achieves a complete lateralisation of structure and causality and reduces all the devices responsible for segmental interaction and syllabic effects to just two: government and licensing. Notions such as coda, closed and open syllable, compensatory and tonic lengthening, extrasyllabicity, stress attraction, strong and weak position, vowel – zero alternation, Sonority Sequencing, Onset Maximisation and many others receive new definitions in LTP, as well as new interpretations, which more often than not combine a number of seemingly unrelated aspects.