Licensed Segments and Safe Paths

Abstract

The following pages sketch a system of constraints intended to sharpen and organize a number of current assumptions surrounding the concept of “prosodic licensing”, as proposed in Itô (1988) and further developed in later work (Bagemihl 1991; Charette 1990; Goldsmith 1990; Inkelas 1991; Itô and Mester 1991; Kaye 1990; Lombardi 1991; Piggott 1991; Zec 1988; and others). The proposal to be developed below draws on Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993); one of the goals is to explicate the notion of the coda as a “secondary licenser” (Goldsmith 1990) and to clarify the privileged status of geminate and partial geminate clusters (Prince 1984) with respect to syllabification. After laying out some background assumptions (Section 1), we present the definitions and constraints that form the core of our theory of licensing (Section 2). We illustrate the approach with an analysis of the syllable structure of Japanese (Section 3) and conclude the paper with a discussion of remaining issues and problems relating to the general typology of syllabification systems (Section 4).