Construction-specific effects of phonological similarity avoidance

Abstract Previous research on similarity avoidance has focused on such phonological factors as featural similarity and adjacency. This paper additionally investigates the phonology-morphology interface and draws attention to morphological and lexical effects of similarity avoidance. Avoidance of identical or similar sounds may give rise to a variety of strategies, including periphrastic category formation, an unexpected allomorph of the stem or affix and a lexical gap. It is argued that, although similarity avoidance has a universal basis in language processing, the various strategies to implement it are construction specific. In particular, it is shown that one construction may exhibit a different scope of OCP effects than another, which entails that the constraints regulating OCP effects should be morphosyntactically indexed, in turn requiring reference to multiple cophonologies with distinct properties. A novel finding is that cophonologies may be delimited by the syntactic category of the base of category formation. Drawing on the insight of Construction Morphology, the analysis represents dissimilation as an interaction of construction-specific OCP constraints with schemas that include reference to the base. In order to derive the gradience of OCP effects, the relevant constraints are ranked on the basis of a similarity metric and formal complexity. The proposed constraint-based analysis aims to represent the construction-specific strategies for dealing with dissimilation and capture the observed gradience of the pressure.