Head - dependent Asymmetry : Feet and Fusion in Malay

The variegated data relating to fusion in Malay have long escaped unified analysis. Past analyses assume that the conditioning environment is morphological. I suggest the question to ask is not why fusion occurs where it does but why it does not occur elsewhere. I show, too, that the answer to this question lies unquestionably in the consideration of prosody, not morphology. Crucially, I claim that the demand for feature recoverability interacts with the prosodic specifications of the language. While seeking independent support in the language for this claim, I find evidence that, far from demanding special treatment, fusion is more appropriately seen as a natural impulse in the language, one of many segmental changes that occur to effect greater prosodic unmarkedness. Within my description of the parameters of fusion, all data relevant to the process that have hitherto been cited as exceptions are, instead, predictable. Fusion in Malay is, in fact, learnable.