Size requirements

Numerous languages of the world exhibit restrictions on the size of possible prosodic words. Many impose restrictions on the minimal size a prosodic word can have, while fewer prohibit prosodic words that exceed a certain size. These types of restrictions can be referred to as word minimality and word maximality, respectively.

These size requirements should not be thought of as primitive phonological conditions but should be characterized as effects of interactions among various prosodic and metrical constraints (de Lacy 2004; McCarthy & Prince 1986).

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Between the two types of size requirements, word minimality is found more generally cross-linguistically. Although cross-linguistic surveys have shown that there is no strong correlation between the minimal word size and the minimal foot (Downing 2006:48-58, 94-100), diverse languages from all over the world require that their prosodic words be minimally one well-formed metrical foot. In SEA, a number of languages including Burmese (Green 2005), Thai (Bennett 1994, 1995), Kayah Li (Bennett 1995), Khmer (Huffman 1972), Indonesian (Cohn & McCarthy 1998) and Moken (Pittayaporn 2005a) prosodic word have been shown to contain at least one well-formed bimoraic foot.

The maximality requirement is not found as commonly as its minimality counterpart. Maximality effects have been shown to operate in Maori and perhaps in Ura (de Lacy 2004). Although unfortunately very few studies have been done on maximality, especially in Southeast Asian languages, some languages including Burmese (Green 2005), Kammu (Pittayaporn 2005c), Moken (Pittayaporn 2005a) and Indonesian (Cohn in progress) have been shown to have at least a strong dispreference for prosodic words that exceed one metrical foot.

Although literature on interaction between word minimality and word maximality is lacking, many languages seem to show effects of both resulting in a situation where the well-formed word is equal to a well-formed foot. For example, in Maori, word minimality requires that a prosodic word be at least one metrical foot while word maximality bans any prosodic words that are larger than one foot. As a result of the interaction, normal prosodic words in Maori contain one single foot and optionally one unfooted syllable. Prosodic words with two feet are allowed only under special circumstances (de Lacy 2004). In Modern Hebrew, prosodic words optimally consist of two syllables that form one metrical foot. Trisyllabic words are allowed only to realize trisyllabic affixes (Ussishkin 2005). Similarly, in Khoekhoe, lexical

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words must be exactly one metrical foot (Brugman 2009) due to the joint effect of minimality and maximality. In SEA, languages that require their prosodic word to be exactly one metrical foot are very common. Some clear cases of such languages include Kammu (Pittayaporn 2005a), Moken (Pittayaporn 2005a), and, to a large extent, Burmese (Green 2005) and Indonesian (Cohn in progress).

2.2.2.2 Sonority

A well-formed prosodic word is one that can be divided exhaustively into one or more formed syllables (Booij 1997). One of the ingredients in the well-formedness of the syllables and the prosodic word is sonority. In particular, strings of segments are syllabified into syllables according to constraints on the relative sonority of the segments. These syllables are then combined to form the prosodic word.

Although its definition is an issue of much debate, it is clear that sonority is linked at least partly to intensity or loudness (Clements 1990; Parker 2002). Sonority can be understood, and can be characterized in terms of hierarchy or scales. Many versions of this hierarchy have been proposed (e.g. Hooper 1976; Selkirk 1984; Steriade 1982), but in this dissertation I adopt Clements (1990)’s proposal that arranges non-syllabic segments from less sonorous to more sonorous classes as given Figure 2-1.

Obstruent Nasal Liquid Glide

0 1 2 3

Figure 2-1 Sonority scale (based on Clements 1990: 292)

In the scale given here, obstruents are the least sonorous and can be said to have the sonority value of 0. On the opposite end of the scale, glides are the most

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sonorous among non-syllabic segments and have the sonority value of 3. Nasal and liquid consonants occupy intermediate positions along the scale, having the sonority values of 1 and 2 respectively. These sonority values are very useful in describing the sonority profile of segments or string of segments.

Most relevant to the issue at hand is the relative sonority among consonants that form a complex onset in a well-formed syllable. Cross-linguistically, permissible consonant clusters are subject to an important constraint, generally known as the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), which states that “in any syllable, there is a segment constituting a sonority peak that is preceded and/or followed by a sequence of segments with progressively decreasing sonority values (Selkirk 1984: 116).” In other words, in a given syllable sonority is lowest at the edges and highest at the syllabic nucleus. Because well-formed syllables are subject to SSP, as part of the syllable complex, onsets are generally expected to follow the same principle as well.

The role of SSP in well-formedness of complex onsets can be illustrated by the case of Spanish initial clusters. Spanish strictly obeys SSP so that all permissible complex onsets consist of a stop followed by a liquid or a glide. For instance, /kl-/, /kr-/

and /kw-/ are well-formed initial clusters as in /klabe/ ‘key’, /krisis/ ‘crisis’, and /kwota/ ‘quota’. This is because /k-/ has lower sonority than /-l-/, /-r-/ and /-w-/, which are closest to the syllabic nucleus. In contrast, /lk-/, /rk-/, /wk-/, are not allowed because the /k-/ is less sonorous than /-l-/, /-r-/, and /-w-/ violating SSP (Harris 1983;

Hualde 1991).

In addition to SSP, languages may further impose a minimal sonority distance on complex onsets (Levin 1985; Selkirk 1984; Venneman 1972; Zec 2007). Such constraint requires that members of complex onsets meet a certain difference in sonority values. Recall the sonority values of different types of consonants in Figure 2-1. In Spanish, /kl-/, /kr-/ are well-formed clusters because the sonority distance between the

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obstruent /k-/ and the following liquids is exactly 2. Similarly, the difference in sonority values between the initial obstruent /k-/ and the glide /w-/ is 3, exceeding the required minimal sonority distance. On the other hand, */pn-/ and */ml-/ are banned in Spanish, even though they do not violate SSP. This is because the sonority distance within each of the consonant sequences is only at 1 respectively (Harris 1983).

Although the role of sonority in syllable well-formedness is robustly attested across languages, clusters that are not predicted by sonority-based generalizations are relatively common. The most well-known case is English clusters /sp-/, /st-/, and /sk-/

as in spy, star, and sky respectively. In these clusters, the /s-/ and the following stops form sonority plateaus in violation of SSP, but they are still well-formed (Halle &

Vergnaud 1980; Steriade 1982). Modern Hebrew allows biconsonantal clusters that consist of an obstruent followed by another obstruent, e.g. /dg-/ as in /dgalim/ ‘flag’, /ks-/ as in /ksamim/ ‘magic’, and /pg-/ as in /pgarim/ ‘carrion’. Instead of a rising sonority, such clusters form sonority plateaus as both the first and the second consonants have the sonority value of 0.

A more extreme case is Polish, which allows long strings of segments that violate SSP to precede the vocalic nucleus, e.g. bdzura ‘nonsense’, fstręt ‘repulsion’.

Interestingly, these complex onsets in Polish have been analyzed as consisting of two separate onsets (Gussmann 1992) or a degenerate syllable followed by an onset (Cho

& King 2003). Sesquisyllabic structure (see §2.4.3) found widely in SEA has been similarly analyzed as comprising a degenerate syllable followed by an onset (Cho &

King 2003; Pittayaporn 2005c). Because in these cases, the consonants in each sequence are not all linked to the same syllable nodes, they in fact do not form syllable clusters in the strict sense.

Kreitman (2008) surveys 62 languages with complex onsets and concludes that there is an implicational hierarchy for the occurrence of different types of consonant

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clusters (S = sonorant, O = obstruent): SO  SS  OO  OS. According to this typology, OS clusters, e.g. /pr-/, /kl-/, /kw-/ etc. are the most basic type of clusters.

The presence of OO clusters, e.g. /pg-/, /st-/, /kt-/ etc. implies the presence of SO clusters. Similarly, the presence of SS clusters, e.g. /ml-/, /nl-/, /rl-/ etc., implies the presence of OS and OO clusters. Lastly, the presence of SO clusters, e.g. /rt-/, /ld-/

etc., implies the presence of the other three cluster types. In this dissertation, I refer to OS clusters as “canonical” or “unmarked” clusters, and refer to the other types of clusters as “marked” clusters.