Conditions on Iterative Rounding Harmony in Oroqen

In this paper, we re-examine the claim that Baiyinna Oroqen, a language of the Tungusic family with a largely predictable distribution of non-high round vowels, requires a non-iterative type of rounding harmony, by demonstrating instead the need for a clear distinction between stem-internal morpheme structure constraints and suffixal vowel harmony. We also propose to revise what was thought to be a requirement that harmony donors must be anchored in two successive syllables; it is instead a restriction that copying of the harmonic feature must be from the closest non-initial vowel

The foot in the history of English: challenges to metrical coherence

Dresher & Lahiri (1991) propose that Old English displays ‘metrical coherence’: different phonological processes are sensitive to the same metrical structure. We consider how English has dealt with challenges to metrical coherence. We show that the resolved moraic trochee, assumed to characterize the early Old English foot (Bermúdez-Otero manuscript; Goering 2016a, b), became untenable after the shortening of unstressed vowels, arguing that this stage of Old English, at least, requires the Germanic Foot, an extended and resolved trochee. After 1570 (Lahiri 2015) the direction of parsing changed from left-to-right to right-to-left when the number of Latin loanwords with stress-affecting suffixes had passed a threshold derived from Yang’s Tolerance Principle (Yang 2016). This change reestablished the metrical coherence that had been disrupted by these words