In this paper I discuss the theoretical implications of a vowel height transfer in Esimbi for three current issues in the analysis of featural phenomena in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). Esimbi exhibits a remarkable surface distribution of vowels: a greater number of vowel height contrasts occur in prefixes than in roots. On the face of it, this appears to belie the generalizati...

comments on this article, and to audiences at the University of Maryland (especially Luigi Burzio, Diamandis Gafos, Linda Lombardi, and Paul Smolensky), at the University of Tromsø (especially Patrik Bye, Mike Hammond, René Kager, Ove Lorentz, and Curt Rice), at the 1997 LSA Summer Institute (especially Tivoli Majors and Eric Bakoviƒ), and at a 1997 HIL course in Amsterdam (especially Harry van...

Nonconcatenative languages have been claimed to employ a special type of phonological spreading of a consonant over a vowel, which assumes a representation that segregates consonants and vowels on different planes. I argue that this type of spreading can and must be eliminated from the theory, by reducing it to segmental copying as in reduplication. Crucial to this reduction is the notion of gr...

In this paper, I argue that a nasal agreement phenomenon in Mbe (BenueCongo, Nigeria; Bamgbose 1971) is a case of reduplication in which material is copied as a nasal coda to a CV prefix with place features linked to the following onset; if place-linking fails, no copy occurs. I demonstrate that this account has important analytical implications for Mbe and more generally, for the theory of red...

In Optimality Theory a grammar consists of a ranking of constraints which are i universal and ii violable. Languages diier systematically only in their rankings of these constraints Prince and Smolensky 1993. The latter is a powerful theoretical principle which plays a central role in the explanatory scope of OT Smolensky 1996a,b, its learnability T esar and Smolensky 1996 and its consequences ...