The Tense-Lax Distinction in English Vowels and the Role of Parochial and Analogical Constraints

The vast majority of the work that has been done in Optimality Theory has focused, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, on the interaction between markedness (or well-formedness) constraints and faithfulness constraints. In this paper I investigate a particular kind of lexical exception, namely cases where phonotactic well- formedness is regularly violated by certain vowel + consonant sequences in most words (including the most common ones), while it is obeyed only in a handful of rare (mostly foreign) words. The focus of discussion is the distribution of tense and lax vowels in Eastern General American English: There are several environments (stressed open final syllables, position before certain consonants and consonant clusters) where the two types of vowel are in near-complementary distribution, but there are a few lexical exceptions among non-low vowels as well as regular violations of the phonotactics among low vowels. In recent loanwords, there are exceptions to these regular violations; in other words, the phonotactically expected pattern is found only in foreign words but not in native words. I argue that these exceptions to well-formedness are attributable to the influence of a network of connections between lexical items, concretely represented in the theory as a web of conjoined output-output (OO) correspondence constraints known as analogical constraints (Myers 1999). More isolated lexical exceptions are attributed to the influence of morpheme-specific parochial constraints. The role that analogical constraints and parochial constraintsplay in this analysis demonstrates an important consequence for Optimality Theory: There is more to phonology than just the interaction between markedness and faithfulness constraints, since constraints can also encourage the proliferation of a phonologically marked pattern, and can also require specific lexical items to have a certain phonological shape.The definitive version of this paper was published in Linguistics in Potsdam 16 (2001)