Patterns of vowel harmony are frequently interrupted by the presence of neutral segments, segments that are obligatorily realised with only one of the harmonic values. Peripherally, neutral segments appear in two patterns, referred to as relative and absolute alignment. Medially, such neutral segments may be opaque, interrupting the transmission of harmony, or they may be transparent, skipped over by harmony. It is argued that the properties of neutrality result from the interaction of three independently motivated families of constraints: faithfulness, alignment, and grounding. No process-specific constraints distinguishing between the types of alignment or between opacity and transparency are required under the proposed account.

This paper discusses and expands upon various ideas concerning the structure of nominals in general (DPs) and of French nominals in particular, with the underlying idea that CP and DP have parallel argumental and functional structure. The main topics discussed are: (i) the projection of arguments in French and English; (ii) the parameterization of N-movement, which accounts for some word order differences between French and English; (iii) the distribution of adjectives in event nominals, which reflects that of adverbs in clauses in both French and English; (iv) a peculiar case of rightward movement out of DP that provides further evidence for N-movement as well as for the claim concerning the prohibition on right adjunction of genitive nominals within DP; and (v) extraction facts that are a consequence of the status of [Spec, DP] as an A′-position in French.