An optimal alternative to Conflation

Abstract

An issue which engaged the attention of phonologists following the publication of Halle & Vergnaud's ground-breaking Essay on stress (1987a) was the proper treatment of stress systems in which iterative foot structure is apparently required to locate the main prominence, yet expected secondary stresses are absent in the output. The solution proposed by Halle & Vergnaud was that unwanted secondary stresses are removed by a special repair mechanism, Conflation, accompanied by the automatic erasure of headless feet. The pattern which initially motivated the rule was found to exist in a very few languages: Cairene Arabic (Mitchell 1956, 1960, 1962; Langendoen 1968; McCarthy 1979; Stevens & Salib 1987), Seminole/Creek (Haas 1977; Jackson 1987; Tyhurst 1987) and possibly Palestinian Arabic (Brame 1973; Kenstowicz & Abdul-Karim 1980; Hayes 1995; inter al.).