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this article concerns autosegmental representations, and not the rules which are presumed to manipulate them. Due to the expository goals of this paper we have not attempted to carry out a detailed analysis of a large body of phonological data, however we acknowledge that this is an important task and it is one that we intend to undertake in future work. Deriving the No-Crossing Constraint Sagey defines three relations on temporal units: simultaneity, precedence and overlap. Certain facts about the first two relations (and presumably the third also) are taken to be `included in our knowledge of the world' (p.110). We begin with a brief review of these facts. Temporal overlap is a two-place relation which is reflexive, symmetric and nontransitive. If we employ the notation x ffi y for the statement `x overlaps y' then these facts about overlap can be stated as follows: (1) a. For any x, x ffi x overlap is reflexive

this paper is to develop an alternative proposal whereby long-distance agreement is brokered via a correspondence-theoretic relation established between the participant segments. We term this approach Long-Distance Agreement through Correspondence or LDAC. A chief assertion of the LDAC proposal is that agreement is determined by Identity constraints which check feature matching in corresponding consonants, thereby obviating representations in which feature linkage skips over spans of neutral segments. Another key claim is that similarity plays a decisive role in identifying which segments stand in correspondence

Eisner's (1997a) Primitive Optimality Theory is a simple formal model of a subset of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). The work presented here implements this model and extends it. The implementation is used to evaluate the Primitive Optimality Theory model, and is in itself a useful tool for linguistic analysis. The model is evaluated in terms of its success or failure as an attempt to formulate a cognitively plausible, computationally tractable, and mathematically formal model of the Optimality Theoretic framework of phonological theory. As part of this evaluation, a comprehensive, implemented analysis is given for the harmony and disharmony phenomena of Turkish. In addition to an evaluation of the Primitive Optimality Theory model, concrete proposals are suggested for possible extensions to the model, and for improved models that, unlike Primitive Optimality Theory, can model non-concatenative morphology, Paradigm Uniformity, and reduplication.

Co-occurrence restrictions on word-initial consonant clusters are traditionally viewed as a consequence of the relative sonority of both members of the CC. In the first part of this paper, I aim to show that the reasoning underlying this approach is circular. The observation that sonority does increase in word-initial clusters is relabelled explanation in saying that sonority must increase. Since the crucial part of this circular argumentation is expressed by a constraint (“sonority must increase within word-initial clusters”), I address the more general issue of constraints in linguistic theory. In the second part of the paper, I propose a constraint-free theory where restrictions on word-initial clusters follow from the interaction of more general principles. The main principles I draw on are Government-Licensing (Charette, 1990), segmental complexity (Harris, 1990) and a strict CVCV syllable-structure (Lowenstamm, 1996). None of these devices makes special reference to wordinitial clusters. Since word-initial restrictions crucially depend on idiosyncratic properties of the consonants involved, I also investigate the internal structure of consonants. In the representations I introduce, the set of observations commonly subsumed under the label sonority is assigned no phonological status. Rather, it is shown to be a function of known phonological primitives. Finally, a

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The paper presents a formalization of the common structure underlying different proposals concerning the geometry of phonological features. Using the concepts and tools of elementary set theory, lattice theory, and the theory of independent boolean algebras, a metatheory of autosegmental feature structure is developed. This metatheory enables us to compare contemporary autosegmental phonology to the now abandoned "standard" phonology and to the historically important Panini-type phonology as well, and to investigate the restrictions on the use of features in phonological theory.

This paper explores a new approach to speech recognition in which su%R ord u9 ts are modeled in terms of lingu stic featu res. Specifically, we have adopted a scheme of modeling separately themanne and articu lation for theseu nits. A novelty of ou r work is theu se of a generalized definition of place of artic u ation that enables u to map both vowels and consonants into a common lingu stic space. Modeling manner and place separately also allowsu s to explore a mu lti-stage recognition architectu]R in which the search space issuF]((% vely redu4% as more detailed models arebrou]( in. In the 8,000 word PhoneBook isolated word telephone speech recognition task, we show that su ch an approach can achieve a recognition WER that is 10% better than that achieved in the best resu ts reported in theliteratu re. This performance gain comes with improvements in search space andcompu ation time as well.

Alternations that are partly phonologically, partly morphologically conditioned are a central problem in phonological theory. In Optimality Theory, two types of solutions have been proposed: morphologically specialized phonological constraints (interface constraints) and different constraint rankings for different morphological categories (cophonologies). This paper presents empirical evidence that distinguishes between these two hypotheses. Stem-final vowel alternations in Finnish are governed by a mixed set of conditions that range from purely phonological to morphological and lexical, from iron-clad exceptionless regularities to quantitative tendencies. Using a standard dictionary as the data base, we show that phonological conditioning plays the dominant role, but in cases where phonology underdetermines the output, morphological conditioning may emerge. We then show that partial ordering of constraints, commonly used to model variation, extends to morphological condi...