Volume 34, Issue 4 -

This paper aims to show that sonority-based generalizations on consonant phonotactics should directly follow from representations, not from stipulations on representations such as the commonly accepted licensing or government statements. The basic reason for this is that the second approach is both arbitrary and circular, as it entails a variable ranking of alleged well-formedness principles, if we want to explain, for example, why TR clusters are either tautosyllabic or heterosyllabic depending on the language. I argue instead for a representational alternative assuming that (i) consonants and vowels are universally segregated, and (ii) involve two parallel CVCV sequences – one on the C-plane, the other on the V-plane – (iii) which may differ in length. It is shown how the major sonority categories, and thereby the phonotactic constraints based on these categories, naturally result from how the two CVCV sequences are synchronized if the one on the C-plane is longer than the one on the V-plane. It will also be seen how the proposed structures naturally account for several processes such as liquid metathesis and deletion, vowel epenthesis, plosive fricativization, etc., while providing a means for measuring the relative likelihood of some of them on the basis of representational markedness.

Long-distance consonant metathesis is less common than the metathesis of adjacent segments but is shown to occur in multiple languages (e.g. Māori kā h e r u ∼$\sim$ kā r e h u ‘spade’) As words tend to be short, and examples rare, it is difficult to assess the tendencies of long-distance consonant metathesis. This paper gives the results of a production experiment with five-syllable nonce words set up to examine the effect of position within the word and stress-status for long-distance consonant/consonant metathesis. It is found that all positions but the initial one are equally likely to be involved in a metathesis, which is consistent with a previous finding that word-initial onsets resist metathesis in adjacent-segment metathesis. Onsets of stressed syllables are also less likely to participate in metathesis with consonants at greater distances than in an adjacent syllable. The findings suggest that long-distance consonant metathesis is not fundamentally different from adjacent-segment metathesis, although, unlike adjacent segment metathesis, it cannot occur as part of regular process.

It has been observed that prosodic accents on wh-phrases improve the acceptability of Intervention Effect configurations in Korean and Japanese. However, this prosody-driven salvation effect has been studied only with the subject-intervener configuration, not with an object-intervener configuration, and surprisingly, the object-intervener configuration is actually not saved by prosody, unlike the situation with subject-interveners. Based on this new observation, the main goal of this paper is to argue that intervention effects, at least in Korean (and Japanese),do not constitute a single phenomenon which can be uniformly explained; structurally similar sentences may have different derivations, and prosody provides a clue to discern the different syntactic derivations which are involved. I crucially assume Korean has two distinct types of covert wh-movement-phrasal movement and ff-movement, as proposed in (Pesetsky, David. 2000. Phrasal movement and its Kin . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). I propose the wh-phrasal movement hypothesis in Korean: when a wh-phrase undergoes phrasal movement in Korean, this movement is represented by means of prosodic accent. As a result of this, the prosody-driven salvation effects in the subject-intervener configuration are attributed to semantic intervention effects applying to ff-movement (not phrasal movement) and the lack of the prosody-driven salvation effects in the object-intervener configuration are suggested to be due to the other locality constraints (Pesetsky, David. 2000. Phrasal movement and its Kin . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

This article argues that there is no narrow syntax, and that the language faculty merely consists of the semantic and phonological components, and linking between these and other systems. It follows as a logical consequence from the latest works of Chomsky (2007 et seq.) and Hauser et al. (2002) who argue that narrow syntax consists of as few features as possible, ideally only recursive embedding and mapping to the interfaces, and Nordström (2014) who shows that the language faculty cannot involve recursive embedding if one wants it to be able to handle discrete infinity, but must merely be a discrete combinatorial system. As such, it shares features with many other mental processes, such as tool making, and, this paper argues, should not be seen as a separate module. The discrete combinatorial processes, as argued here, take place in the semantic and phonological components, which are linked by an axonal pathway. The paper further shows that other potential features of narrow syntax, namely word order, agreement and case (Pinker and Jackendoff 2005; Chomsky 2000 et seq.) can also perfectly well be located within the semantic and phonological components, dispensing with so-called uninterpretable features and leading to the ultimate conclusion that there is no narrow syntax.