Soft labial conspiracy in Kurpian

Abstract

This article investigates soft labial conspiracy in Kurpian, a dialect of Polish that has not been discussed in the generative literature to date. The conspiracy involves four processes: decomposition, simplification, depalatalization, and vowel retraction. These processes are united by the goal to eliminate palatalized labials from the surface representation. The article argues against bidirectional IDENT constraints and for the tenet of Derivational/Stratal OT that analysis must proceed in steps. The evidence comes from the nature of decomposition and from the fact that depalatalization constitutes a Duke-of-York derivation.