Unifying Phonotactics and Derived Environment Blocking through Prosodic Constraint Indexation

In typical forms of derived environment blocking, restrictions on segment sequences within a prosodic domain are weakened when the same segments span a prosodic juncture. In this paper, I argue that these patterns are accounted for by indexing markedness constraints to the spans of prosodic constituents. By setting domains for phonotactic restrictions, these prosodically-indexed constraints account for derived environment blocking effects in parallel Optimality Theory (Smolensky and Prince 1993; McCarthy and Prince 1995). Furthermore, where prosodic Strict Layering is violated (Selkirk 1996), these constraints correctly predict cases where more marked structures are admitted in extraprosodic affixes than in root morphemes. The predictions of the proposal are compared with those of edge-based theories of domain restrictions, such as CRISPEDGE constraints (Ito and Mester 1999), which I argue do not account for the same range of blocking effects. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the basic schema for prosodic constraint indexation. Section 3 discusses a pattern of constraint interaction that arises under Strict Layering violations, where extraprosodic material admits more marked structures than stem segments. Section 4 presents the inadequacies of purely edge-based constraints to account for these patterns. Section 5 concludes the paper.