Poko (Skou, Papua New Guinea) displays a complex tone system, with three contrastive levels, toneless syllables and floating tones. Lexical tone is characterised by robust patterns of anti-alignment, wherein high (H) tones may not be initial and low (L) tones may not be final (McPherson & Dryer 2021; McPherson 2022). This article analyses the postlexical realisation of tone, especially the behaviour of floating tones, rising tones and toneless syllables. The Poko tone system shows unique twists on cross-linguistic patterns, such as the OCP, tone raising before L and the avoidance of non-final rising tones. We demonstrate that the behaviour of floating tones cannot be accounted for in a constraint-based theory with global evaluation, as in traditional Optimality Theory or Harmonic Grammar. Instead, the data motivate the use of directional Harmonic Serialism (Lamont 2022b), wherein changes are made incrementally and directionally, thus avoiding the creation of ties among otherwise similar candidates.

This article investigates phonological complexity by using artificial neural network and Bayesian structural equation models to derive representations of phonological complexity from counts of the segments associated with particular features in languages’ phonemic inventories. These latent representations can then be used alongside principal component analysis to further analyse how interactions between phonological features affect overall complexity, and what phonological complexity patterns a model can detect in a phonological feature data set. The results indicate that the per-feature segment counts investigated tend to contribute positively to a language’s complexity, and that the latent complexity variables approximate a log-normal distribution. This implies that phonological complexifications co-occur with other complexifications diachronically while tending to be more constrained at the upper and lower ends of the complexity range.

This article presents a case of superadditive ganging-up cumulativity in the metrical phonology of Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian (BCMS). BCMS individually permits monomoraic feet and feet with a toneless head mora, but prohibits toneless monomoraic feet. Across BCMS dialects, several prosodic processes conspire against this doubly marked structure. Because of the superadditive character of this interaction, both Optimality Theory and, importantly, Harmonic Grammar require local constraint conjunction to capture the ban on toneless monomoraic feet in BCMS. This demonstration constitutes evidence for conjoined constraints in weighted constraint grammar. The study contributes to the typology of cumulativity effects by documenting superadditive ganging up in a categorical prosodic pattern, whereas virtually all previously reported cases of superadditivity have been observed in variable phonological patterns.

This article examines the default stress pattern of Sentani (Papuan), situates it within the typology of iambic stress patterns, and provides an analysis within the Weak Bracketing framework for metrical stress theory. Sentani is unique in sometimes employing clash (adjacent stressed syllables) and other times employing lapse (adjacent stressless syllables) in an effort to avoid final stress in even-parity forms. Clash is employed in four-syllable forms, but lapse is employed in longer even-parity forms. Key to the analysis are constraints insisting that both the initial foot and the final foot carry a stress. When the initial and final foot are adjacent (i.e., in four-syllable forms), insisting that both be stressed results in a clash. When the initial and final foot are not adjacent (i.e., in longer even-parity forms), a medial foot emerges without stress in order to avoid clash.

This article tests theories of verb stress in the Northwest Caucasian language Abkhaz using a new database corpus of 3,115 inflected forms of 445 verbs. I describe the creation of the corpus and show how it can be used to gain new insights into principles of Abkhaz stress assignment, which depend on complex interactions between phonology and polysynthetic verbal morphology. I implement a previous theory of Abkhaz stress assignment (Dybo 1977) in a computer program and use the corpus to assess empirically how well it accounts for stress patterns across the lexicon of eventive verbs in Abkhaz. I show how this empirical evaluation identifies both strengths and weaknesses of the theory, and use these to propose a revised theory of Abkhaz stress assignment. The revised theory ties with or outperforms the original in all verb categories, accounting for the stress alternations in 40 additional verbs, which comprise almost 10% of the corpus. This shows that corpora, combined with computational implementations of phonological theories, can be used to further our understanding of highly complex phonological data sets.

This article explores the role of token frequency and global prosodic length in conditioning optional paradigm uniformity in Japanese voiced velar nasalisation, with data from two wug-tests carried out with speakers of Tōhoku Japanese. Experiment 1 demonstrates that frequency-conditioning observed in corpus data is reproduced in existing and novel compounds and holds at the level of the speaker. Experiment 2 focuses on a typologically unusual pattern where overall compound length in mora seems to influence nasalisation, a candidate for a ‘counting’ pattern in phonology. We find that instead of overall length, speakers are sensitive to the length of the second member of the compound, undercutting the viability of the mora-counting analysis. We discuss the importance of the results in adjudicating between existing models of how token frequency impacts the phonological grammar and suggest that only theories that allow individual morphemes to exhibit frequency-sensitive behaviour are sufficiently expressive to model the finding.

The subregular hypothesis posits that all phonological markedness constraints can be described by some principled, learnable subclass of the regular languages. In this article, I classify a wide range of attested long-distance phonological markedness constraints, covering stress, harmony and tone, with focus on interactions of constraints over multiple tiers. To this end, connections are established between propositional logic over multiple tiers and algebraic properties of formal languages. These techniques allow for mechanical verification or refutation of membership in a class. Modelling the constraints and their induced patterns as formal languages, I demonstrate that the entire range lies within the propositional level, including Uyghur backness harmony and Karanga Shona tone, which have been presented as challenges to aspects of the subregular hypothesis.