Hideki Zamma (Kobe City University of Foreign Studies):

Accentuation in Rendaku words: Implications for a theory of 
constraint interaction


     Although Rendaku (or Sequential Voicing) has been extensively studied 
in the literature, its relation to accentuation has not.  This paper 
provides distributional facts of such relations, paying particular attention 
to proper nouns.  It will then become clear that there is a correlation 
between them: words which undergo Rendaku tend to be accentless.

     The question then arises as to which of these phenomena represents the 
ultimate source of the other: Is it 'If Rendaku, then accentless', or 'If 
accentless then Rendaku'? Not surprisingly, there are some exceptions which 
do not conform to the generalization given above. Investigating these 
offers us a clue with which we can properly solve the problem in question.

     At this point, a further question naturally arises: How can this kind 
of correlation of processes be dealt with in the framework of Optimality 
Theory?  In this paper it is argued that (for better or worse) it cannot 
be analyzed in OT in a satisfactory way. In a theory which utilizes only 
hierarchical constraints, it is impossible to ensure that one process can 
derive another.