According to a widespread view the lexicon is a kind of appendix to the grammar, whose function is to list what is unpredictable and irregular about the words of a language. In more recent studies it has been acquiring a rich internal organization of its own and is becoming recognized as the site of pervasive grammatical regularities. The particular approach to the lexicon that I will assume in this paper comes out of this trend, integrating several ideas from work on (...) both morphology and phonology in the seventies. I shall begin by outlining the central assumptions and their motivation, and proceed to a series of issues raised by this framework which,have to do with the proper formulation of word—formation processes. (shrink)

Obviation versus Blocking. Two approaches to the distribution of anaphors and pronominals have been explored in Binding Theory. The OBVIATION approach, originating in Lasnik 1976 and extensively developed in the GB tradition, posits autonomous disjoint reference principles which directly filter out illicit coindexations in certain structural domains. The BLOCKING approach treats disjoint reference derivatively, by making anaphors obligatory under coreference in the binding domain, and invoking a syntactic or pragmatic principle that forces disjoint reference pronominals in the “elsewhere” case.

Current theories make a distinction between two types of case, STRUCTURAL case and INHERENT (or LEXICAL) case (Chomsky 1981), similar to the older distinction between GRAMMATICAL and SEMANTIC case (Kuryłowicz 1964).1 Structural case is assumed to be assigned at S-structure in a purely configurational way, whereas inherent case is assigned at D-structure in possible dependence on the governing predicates’s lexical properties. It is well known that not all cases fall cleanly into this typology. In particular, there is a class of (...) cases that pattern syntactically with the structural cases, but are semantically conditioned. These cases however depend on different semantic conditions than inherent cases do: instead of being sensitive to the thematic relation that the NP bears to the verbal predicate, they are sensitive to the NP’s definiteness, animacy, or quantificational properties, or to the aspectual character of the VP, or to some combination of these factors. The Finnish partitive is a particularly clear instance of this apparently hybrid category of semantically conditioned structural case. (shrink)

This condensed review of recent trends and developments in historical linguistics proceeds from the empirical to the conceptual, from ‘what’ to ‘how’ to ‘why’. I begin with new findings about the origins, relationships, and diversity of the world’s languages, then turn to the processes and mechanisms of change as they concern practicing historical linguists, continue with efforts to ground change in the acquisition, use, and structure of language, and conclude with a look at ongoing debates concerning the explanatory division of (...) labor between historical and theoretical linguistics and ways to unify historical and theoretical linguistics. The emphasis throughout is on current research rather than on established textbook knowledge. (shrink)

Word meaning confronts us, as acutely as anything in syntax, with what Chomsky has called Plato’s problem.1 We know far more about the meaning of almost any word than we could have learned just from our exposure to uses of it. Communication would be unbearably laborious if we did not share with other speakers the ability to generalize the meanings of words in the right ways. As Fodor (1981) notes in arguing for the innateness of lexical semantics, the most we (...) might plausibly have learned about meaning of the verb paint is that it means something like “to cover with paint”. Even if we have only seen this done with a brush, we have no hesitation in applying the verb correctly to novel techniques of painting, such as rolling, spraying, or dipping. But when a vat of paint explodes in a paint factory, covering everyone with paint, or when Vel´. (shrink)

Phonological opacity and paradigmatic effects (“synchronic analogy”) have long been of interest in relation to change, naturalness, and the phonology/morphology interface. Their investigation has now acquired a new urgency, because they call into question OT’s postulate that constraints are evaluated in parallel. Conceptually, parallelism is one of the basic and most interesting tenets of OT, and so there are good methodological reasons to try hard to save it in the face of such recalcitrant data. The price to be paid for (...) it is the introduction of otherwise unneeded powerful new types of Faithfulness constraints, such as Output/Output (O/O) con- straints, Paradigm Uniformity constraints, and Sympathy constraints, which have turned out to compromise the OT program very severely. (shrink)

The transition from Middle English to Modern English in the second half of the 14th century is a turning point in the syntax of the language. It is at once the point when several constraints on nominal arguments that had been gaining ground since Old English become categorical, and the point when a reorganization of the functional category Infl is initiated, whose completion over the next several centuries yields essentially the syntactic system of the present day. From this time on, (...) subjects are obligatory, and they must be placed in Spec-IP position. In the VP, the last traces of OV order disappear, the order of direct and indirect object becomes fixed, the first “recipient passives” enter the language, and objects cease to be separable from the verb by adverbs or adjuncts. The V2 constraint of Old and Middle English is lost, as topicalized constituents cease to trigger verb-fronting. Concurrently, in the Infl system, the first instances of periphrastic do-support begin to replace fronting of the finite main verb, and, with the appearance of split infinitives and pro-infinitives, to starts to pattern as a non-finite Aux rather than, as in earlier stages, as a prefix marking the infinitive. All these changes have been dated to the second half of the 14th century, most of them specifically to the period between 1360 and 1380. (shrink)

In English, [1e] occurs only in have got, but it is included here because of its importance in other languages. In Vedic Sanskrit and ancient Greek, for example, the perfect of many achievement predicates can be used to denote the result state. A good semantics of the perfect should therefore have something to say about it.

An interesting asymmetry in syntactic change is that OV base order is commonly replaced by VO, whereas the reverse development is quite rare in languages.1 A shift to VO has taken place in several branches of the Indo-European family, as well as in Finno-Ugric. The Germanic languages conform to this trend in that the original OV order seen in its older representatives, and (in more rigid form) in modern German, Dutch, and Frisian, has given way to a consistently head-initial syntax (...) in English, Scandinavian, and Yiddish. (shrink)

Some of the most salient differences among Arabic vernaculars have to do with syllable structure. This study focuses on the syllabification patterns of three dialect groups, (1) VC-dialects, (2) C-dialects, and (3) CV-dialects,1 and argues that they differ in the licencing of SEMISYLLA- BLES, moras unaffiliated with syllables and adjoined to higher prosodic constituents. The analysis provides some evidence for a constraint-based version of Lexical Phonology, which treats word phonology and sentence phonology as distinct constraint systems which interact in serial (...) fashion. (shrink)

Hayes & MacEachern’s study of quatrain stanzas in English folk songs was the first application of stochastic Optimality Theory to a large corpus of data.1 It remains the most extensive study of versification that OT has to offer, and the most careful and perceptive formal analysis of folk song meter in any framework. In a follow-up study, Hayes concludes that stress and meter — or more generally, the prosodic structure of language and verse — are governed by separate constraint systems (...) which must be jointly satisfied by well-formed verse. Apart from its convincing arguments for a modular approach to metrics, it is notable for successfully implementing the analysis in OT, a framework whose parallelist commitments might seem philosophically at odds with modularity. (shrink)

ah¯ aras) are defined on the ´ Sivas¯ utras and other similarly organized lists by the convention that if xq is followed in the list by the marker Q, then xpQ denotes the set of elements xp, xp+1, ... xq. The phonological classes defined in this way are referred to in hundreds of rules in the As.t.¯adhy¯ay¯i.

Inflected words in Finnish show a range of interdependent stem and suffix alternations which are conditioned by syllable structure and stress. In a penetrating study, Anttila (1997) shows how the statistical preferences among optional alternants of the Genitive Plural can be derived from free constraint ranking. I propose an analysis which covers the rest of the nominal morphology and spells out the phonological constraints that interact to produce the alternations, and show how it supports a stratal version of OT phonology.

to maximize USER-FRIENDLINESS. Its reputation of being impenetrable is quite undeserved. Of course it is a very complex work, but the complications are those of the language itself and of the brevity with which the analysis is presented. Examples of user-friendliness include the systematicity and consistency of the..

In ancient Greek, the pitch accent of most words depends on the syllabification assigned to underlying representations, while a smaller, morphologically identifiable class of derived words is accented on the basis of the surface syllable structure, which results from certain contraction and deletion processes. Noyer 1997 proposes a cyclic analysis of these facts and argues that they are incompatible with parallel OT assumptions. His central claim is that the pre-surface syllabification to which accent is assigned in the bulk of the (...) Greek vocabulary does not occur at a “level privileged by UG,” such as the word level or the “cycle-final” level, but simply at an arbitrary point in the derivation.. The implication is that extrinsic rule ordering is required to do justice to the accent system. Thus, Noyer’s work presents a challenge to any version of OT phonology. In this paper, I take up the challenge and argue that, although fully parallel OT may not be up to dealing with these accentual facts, the stratal version of OT based on Lexical Phonology and Phonology provides a much better analysis of them than phonology with ordered rules does. (shrink)

Paradigms that combine synthetic (one-word) and periphrastic forms in complementary distribution have loomed large in discussions of morphological blocking (McCloskey and Hale 1983, Poser 1986, Andrews 1990). Such composite paradigms potentially challenge the lexicalist claim that words and sentences are organized by distinct subsystems of grammar. They are of course grist for the mill of Distributed Morphology, a theory which revels in every kind of interpenetration of morphology and syntax. But they have prompted even Paradigm Function Morphologists to introduce syntactic (...) constructions into their morphology. I shall argue, instead, for a lexicalist treatment, which is based on the idea that blocking is a filtering device that applies to the output of the generative system, rather than operating directly on its derivations (Wunderlich 1996). I present this approach to blocking in section 1, and show in section 2 how it deals with the intricate composite verb paradigm of Latin, where the periphrastic perfect passive supplies the missing pieces of an otherwise synthetic inflectional system. This part of Latin verb morphology has recently been treated from the perspective of Distributed Morphology and Paradigm Function Morphology. I compare my solution to these treatments and argue that it is superior in two respects: it predicts the complementarity of the synthetic and periphrastic formations and yet allows their respective morphological and syntactic properties to be captured, and it readily covers some basic data that the other analyses get wrong. (shrink)

Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes. Select the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities.

Is P¯an.ini’s grammar prescriptive or descriptive, or perhaps both at the same time? The answer determines, among many other things, how we should render v¯a and vibh¯as.¯a in his optional rules. If the grammar is prescriptive, these terms can mean “preferably” and “marginally”. If it is purely..

In late Medieval Greek and many modern dialects, pronominal clitics are syntactically adjoined to an IP projection. In another set of dialects they have become syntactically adjoined to a verbal head. In the most innovating dialects (which include Standard Greek) they are agreement affixes. Extending the Fontana/Halpern clitic typology, we propose a trajectory of lexicalization from Xmax clitics via X0 clitics to lexical affixes. The evolution of clitic placement also reveals the rise of a composite functional projection ΣP.

Early Vedic possesses a chameleon-like verb form called the injunctive, whose uses partly overlap with, and alternate with, those of the subjunctive, optative and imperative moods, and with the past and present tenses. Being morphologically tenseless and moodless, the injunctive has attracted interest from a comparative Indo-European perspective because it appears to be an archaic layer of the finite verb morphology. Its place and function in the verb system, however, remains disputed. In Kiparsky 1968 I argued that it is (...) tenseless and moodless not only morphologically but also functionally, and that injunctive forms acquire modal and temporal interpretations only contextually. The injunctive’s only intrinsic grammatical features are aspect, voice and person/number. This paper provides new evidence for that view (section 1), and goes on to argue that such underspecified forms in paradigms support morpheme-based theories of morphology over realizational theories such as Paradigm Function Morphology (section 2), and that the rise and loss of the injunctive is connected to other changes in the pre- and post-Vedic aspect, tense, and mood system (section 3). (shrink)

ignate remote or historical past, the perfect being furthermore restricted to events not witnessed by the speaker.3 In the intervening stage of Vedic Sanskrit, the past tenses show a complex mix of temporal, aspectual, and discourse functions. On top of that, Rigvedic retains the injunctive, a chameleon-like category of underspecified finite verbs whose many uses partly overlap with those of the past tenses. The present study of the Rigvedic system is offered as a preliminary step towards the reconstruction and theoretical (...) interpretation of this aspect-to-tense trajectory. (shrink)

If language change is constrained by grammatical structure, then synchronic assumptions have diachronic consequences. Theories of grammar can then in principle contribute to explaining properties of change, or conversely be falsified by historical evidence. This has been the main stimulus for incorporating historical linguistics into generative theorizing.

We describe four successive rounds of Jespersen’s cycle in Greek and analyze the process as the iteration of a semantically driven chain shift. The contrast between plain and emphatic negation is an easily lost yet necessary part of language, hence subject to repeated renewal by morphosyntactic and/or lexical means.

Sanskrit nominal compounds, highly productive at all stages of the language, are normally formed by combining bare nominal stems (sometimes with special stem-forming endings) into a compound stem, which bears exactly one lexical accent. A class of Vedic dvandva compounds (also known as copulative compounds, co-ordinating compounds, or co-compounds) diverge from this pattern in that each of their constituents has a separate word accent and what looks like a dual case ending.1 They are invariably definite, and refer to conventionally associated (...) pairs of divine or human beings, or personified natural and ritual objects. (shrink)

Compared to more familiar varieties of Swedish, the dialects spoken in Finland have rather diverse syllable structures. The distribution of distinctive syllable weight is determined by grammatical factors, and by varying effects of final consonant weightlessness. In turn it constrains several gemination processes which create derived superheavy syllables, in an unexpected way which provides evidence for an anti-neutralization constraint. Stratal OT, which integrates OT with Lexical Phonology, sheds light on these complex quantity systems.

According to the neogrammarians and de Saussure, all linguistic change is either sound change, analogy, or borrowing.1 Meillet (1912) identified a class of changes that don’t fit into any of these three categories. Like analogical changes, they are endogenous innovations directly affecting morphology and syntax, but unlike analogical changes, they are not based on any pre-existing patterns in the language. Meillet proposed that they represent a fourth type of change, which he called GRAMMATICALIZATION. Its essential property for him was that (...) it gives rise to new grammatical categories — that is, to categories previously unexpressed in the language — and thereby transforms its overall system. (shrink)

The modern study of versification is based on the hypothesis that language is rhythmically organized, that metrical patterns are defined by simple rhythmic schemata, and that the two are related by correspondence constraints. Some analyses of the phenomenon of “inversion” in iambic verse reject a central aspect of this hypothesis in positing more complex metrical schemata containing both trochaic and iambic feet. I present evidence against such “trochaic substitution” analyses and demonstrate the iambic character of inverted feet with statistical data (...) from the metrical practice of thirtysix Finnish poets. As a latecomer to the use of statistical evidence in theoretical linguistics I gratefully dedicate this article to one of the pioneers of this method. (shrink)

persusasions are in addition impressed by its remarkable conciseness, and by the rigorous consistency with which it deploys its semi-formalized metalanguage, a grammatically and lexically regimented form of Sanskrit. Empiricists like Bloomfield also admired it for another, more specific reason, namely that it is based on nothing but very general principles such as simplicity, without prior commitments to any scheme of “universal grammar”, or so it seems, and proceeds from a strictly synchronic perspective. Generative linguists for their part have marveled (...) especially at its ingenious technical devices, and at intricate system of conventions governing rule application and rule interaction that it presupposes, which seem to uncannily anticipate ideas of modern linguistic theory (if only because many of them were originally borrowed from P¯. (shrink)

It is the foundation of all traditional and modern analyses of Sanskrit, as well as having great historical and theoretical interest in its own right. Western grammatical theory has been influenced by it at every stage of its development for the last two centuries. The early 19th century comparativists learned from it the principles of morphological analysis. Bloomfield modeled both his classic Algonquian grammars and the logical-positivist axiomatization of his Postulates on it. Modern linguistics acknowledges it as the most complete (...) generative grammar of any language yet written, and continues to adopt technical ideas from it. (shrink)

In Stratal OT, morphology and phonology are stratified and interleaved, as in traditional Lexical Phonology (Mohanan 1986), but the strata (Stem, Word, Postlexical) are characterized by systems of parallel constraints. The output of each morphological operation is submitted to the phonological constraints on its stratum: stems must satisfy the stem phonology, words must satisfy the word phonology, and Phrase must satisfy the phrasal phonology.1 For example, an affix which is added to stems to form words would enter into the derivation (...) in the following fashion. (shrink)

The fundamental fact that any theory of case must address is that morphological form and syntactic function do not stand in a one-to-one correspondence, yet are systematically related.1 Theories of case differ in whether they define case categories at a single structural level of representation, or at two or more levels of representation. For theories of the first type, the mismatches raise a dilemma when morphological form and syntactic function diverge. Which one should the classification be based on? Generally, such (...) single-level approaches determine the case inventory on the basis of morphology using paradigmatic contrast as the basic criterion, and propose rules or constraints that map the resulting cases to grammatical relations. (shrink)

1. Germanic prosody. The early Germanic languages are characterized by fixed initial stress, free quantity, and a preference for moraic trochees, left-headed bimoraic feet consisting either of two light syllables (LL) or of one heavy syllable (H).1 The two-mora foot template places indirect constraints on syllable structure, by making it hard to accommodate three-mora syllables, as well as one-mora syllables in contexts where they cannot join another one-mora syllable to form a two-mora trochee. Syllable structure is also constrained more directly (...) by a preference for simple onsets, which entails an avoidance both of hiatus and of syllable-initial consonant clusters. Processes of syllabification, deletion, shortening and lengthening in the Germanic languages favor those quantitative and syllabic patterns that fit these prosodic conditions, and repair those that do not.2 It is not always possible to satisfy all of the preferences at the same time, however, and so the morphophonology must adjudicate between their conflicting demands. While the preferences themselves are invariant, the languages diverge in how they resolve contradictions between them. Some stretch the prosodic limits by allowing excess segments to be accommodated by overlength or resolution, others delete segments (e.g. glide deletion, high vowel deletion), adjust vowel length to fit the template, or tolerate hiatus. For example, a long ja-stem such as /herdi-/ with a vocalic ending, say /herdi-a/,3 presents a prosodic quandary to which the languages respond with three different compromises: (1) a. Proto-Germanic: *hir. i.a (hiatus) b. Gothic: herd.ja (a three-mora syllable) c. Old Icelandic: hir. a (deletion of j). (shrink)

P¯an.ini’s grammar includes several types of metarules which determine how its operational rules apply. Among them are “traffic rules” which constrain how rules interact with each other in grammatical derivations. These are typically formulated as designating a rule or class of rules asiddha “not effected” (or asiddhavat “as if not effected”) with respect to another rule or class of rules. For economy, the rules so designated are grouped into several sections, whose headings collectively declare them to be asiddha(vat). The biggest (...) such section, under the famous heading 8.2.1 p ¯urvatr¯asiddham, extends from 8.2.1 through the end of the grammar (8.4.68), and is hence called the Trip¯ad¯ı ‘Three Sections’. (shrink)

Case (a) has been familiar for a long time, and is supported by a fair amount of historical evidence (Kiparsky 1968, 1973). It was adopted by NGG (Vennemann 1972, Hooper 1976) and by Natural Phonology (Stampe 1972/1980). Prince & Smolensky 1993 dub it lexicon optimization, and show that it is a consequence of basic assumptions of OT.

We rebut Pappas’ critique (this issue) of our treatment of Late Medieval Greek clausal syntax and clitic placement (Condoravdi & Kiparsky 2001), point out some weaknesses of his counterproposal, and suggest directions for further research.

(1) What are the functional categories of a language? A proposal. a. Syntax: functional categories are projected by functional heads. b. Morphology: functional categories are assigned by affixes or inherently marked on lexical items.

(2) Why is there the most deletion when the next word begins with a consonant? Why does “pause” have different effects on the frequency of deletion? The following table shows the rate of retained -t, -d for five groups of speakers: _##C _## _##V Philadelphians (Guy 1980) .00 .88 .62 New Yorkers (Guy 1980) .00 .17 .34 Sansei (Iwai 1993) .12 .48 .84 Nisei (Iwai 1993) .41 .36 .70 Chicanos (Santa Ana 1991) .39 .68 .67..

COMPOSITIONAL approaches to mobile accentuation of the Indo-European type derive the accent of words from the lexically specified accentual features of their constituent morphemes, together with the BASIC ACCENTUATION PRINCIPLE (BAP), which erases all accents but the leftmost one, and assigns an accent to the left edge of an unaccented domain.1 I propose here a compositional analysis in which BAP is a phrase-level process and stems default to the right by the OXYTONE RULE. I argue that zero grade ablaut is (...) sensitive to the accents erased by the BAP, and therefore applies before it. In agreement with most compositional analyses, I distinguish between DOMINANT and RECESSIVE derivational suffixes. 2 COMPOSITIONAL approaches to mobile accentuation of the Indo-European type derive the accent of words from the lexically specified accentual features of their constituent morphemes, together with the BASIC ACCENTUATION PRINCIPLE (BAP), which erases all accents but the leftmost one, and assigns an accent to the left edge of an unaccented domain.3 I propose here a compositional analysis in which BAP is a phrase-level process and stems default to the right by the OXYTONE RULE. I argue that zero grade ablaut is sensitive to the accents erased by the BAP, and therefore applies before it. In agreement.. (shrink)

During a brief encounter with a Livonian sailor on the Copehagen waterfront, Vilhelm Thomsen noticed in his speech a prosodic feature, found in no other Balto-Finnic language, which he instantly identified with the stød of his own native Danish.1 In the few hours that he was able to spend with the seaman, Thomsen accurately identified the essentials of the Livonian stød’s distribution, noting that it occurs in heavy syllables that end in what he called a “sonant coefficient” and that it (...) interacts with quantitative gradation in morphological paradigms. His observations, which appeared as a last-minute addendum to his famous Ber¨oringer (Thomsen 1890:58-63), were con- firmed and extended through extensive work on Livonian by Finnish linguists in the interwar decades. They produced a magnificent Livonian dictionary, from which most of the data in my paper is drawn (Kettunen 1938), a series of instrumental phonetic studies (Kettunen 1925, Posti 1936, Posti 1937, Penttil¨a & Posti 1941), and two historical grammars (Posti 1942, Kettunen 1947). Vihman (1971) and Suhonen (1982) contributed additional observations on the phonetics of stød. Wiik (1989) summarizes all this previous research, and discusses the stød’s phonological interpretation and origin. Unfortunately all further inquiry into Livonian prosody will have to make do with the existing data because the language is now on the brink of extinction. (shrink)

The publication of this joint book by the founder of generative metrics and a distinguished literary linguist is a major event.1 F&H take a fresh look at much familiar material, and introduce an eye-opening collection of metrical systems from world literature into the theoretical discourse. The complex analyses are clearly presented, and illustrated with detailed derivations. A guest chapter by Carlos Piera offers an insightful survey of Southern Romance metrics.

tory of Electronics, MIT, 1966. Über den deutschen Akzent, Studia Grammatica 7.69-97, 1966. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin. A propos de l’accentuation du grec ancien, Langages 1967, 73-93. A Phonological Rule of Greek, Glotta 44.109-134, 1967. Sonorant Clusters in Greek, Language 43.619-635, 1967. Tense and Mood in Indo-European Syntax. Foundations of Language 4, pp. 30-57, 1967. Syntactic and Semantic Relations in P¯an.ini (with J.F. Staal). Foundations of Language 5, pp. 83-117.

Is Pāṇini’s grammar prescriptive or descriptive, or perhaps both at the same time? The answer determines, among many other things, how we should render vā and vibhāṣā in his optional rules. If the grammar is prescriptive, these terms can mean “preferably” and “marginally”. If it is purely descriptive, then only “frequently” and “rarely” are appropriate translations. In Pāṇini as a Variationist (henceforth PV )I suggested that both translations are equally valid, on the grounds that the Aṣṭādhyāyī is at the same (...) time a faithful record of the usage of a community of śiṣṭas, and part of a project to canonize that usage as correct, meant to be binding on all users of the language. Devasthali (1983), however, objected that the idea of “better” or “worse” usage is “foreign to the ancient Sanskrit grammatical works and grammarians”, because they do not deal with incorrect apaśabdas, only with sādhusabdas – the correct words of the divine language. (shrink)

Ottoman Turkish.1 The shared metrical taxonomy for the four languages provided by al-Khal¯ıl’s elegant system is a convenient frame of reference, but also tends to mask major differences between their actual metrical repertoires. The biggest divide separates Arabic and Persian, but Urdu and Turkish have in their turn innovated more subtly on their Persian model.

a. Assume that every feature value F is excluded by a constraint *F. Marked feature values are visible because the constraints that exclude them universally dominate the constraints that exclude the corresponding unmarked feature value: universal constraint domination relation *MF *UF. E.g.

Evolutionary Phonology. Evolutionary Phonology seeks to derive typological generalizations from recurrent patterns of language change, themselves assumed to be rooted in perception, production, and acquisition. The goal is to eliminate UG by providing diachronic explanations for the cross-linguistic evidence that has been used to motivate it. (2) shows a schema of this program, where the arrows can be read as “explains” and/or “constrains”.

We propose an OT-theoretic typology of vowel harmony systems based on a comparative study of front/back harmony. Harmony processes are governed by a general constraint that imposes feature agreement on neighboring segments. Disharmonic (“neutral”) segments arise when this constraint is dominated by markedness constraints and/or by faithfulness constraints that govern segment inventories. These constraint interactions determine whether disharmonic segments are opaque or transparent, and fix the cross-linguistically diverse behavior of the latter. We make crucial use of two modes of local (...) constraint conjunction, which are already implicit in the current theory. Our proposal restricts this theory by eliminating the possibility of freely stipulating the domain of local conjunction. (shrink)