Prosodic buffers: A constraint-based account of English vowel laxing

Abstract

Using the tools of prosodic repulsion, this paper proposes a unified constraint-based account of vowel length alternation in sets of morphologically related English words such as wise?wisdom, tone?tonic and sane?sanity. These alternations, originally analyzed in SPE as resulting from rules of pre-cluster laxing, -ic/-id/-ish laxing and trisyllabic laxing, and in later work (e.g. Borowsky 1986, Myers 1987, Yip 1987) from shortening rules, are re-analyzed here as the result not of rule-based processes but of a parallel evaluation of ranked constraints. While the monomoraicity of words such as wisdom is determined by basic constraints regulating the maximum weight of a syllable, the moraicity of coda consonants, and moraic faithfulness, the short stressed vowel in words such as tonic and sanity emerges through the interaction not only of the three aforementioned constraints but also of two newly proposed ones. The first of these is a moraic resistance constraint that militates against the alignment of a strong mora with a syllable edge, and the second is a prosodic buffer constraint which formalizes a ban against vocalic buffers. As a result of this interaction of constraints, the intervocalic consonant in the optimal candidates of words like tonic and sanity is syllabified in the coda position of the stressed syllable, serving as a buffer between the strong mora and the syllable edge to quell the force of repulsion between them.