Tracing the path of constraint movement: The Austronesian binary-foot requirement and word-minimum phenomena
Alexander D. Smith
Austronesian languages are known for their strong disyllabic preference and strict enforcement of a two-mora minimum at both word and foot levels, especially in Oceanic languages. Languages to the west, however, are less often described in such a way. Comparative evidence also suggests that at the PAN and PMP levels, subminimal words were allowed and appeared in abundance in words with a schwa in an open penultimate syllable. Schwa was a weightless segment which did not contribute to lexical mora count. In diachronic Optimality Theory, the change from subminimal permission to strictly binary feet involved the movement of constraints over time. In this talk, I analyze the eventual strict implementation of a two-mora minimum as a consequence of the gradual promotion of a constraint, FOOT-BINARY, over intervening constraints. I discuss evidence that the constraint was promoted gradually, over intervening constraints one at a time. A gradual promotion approach can explain several phenomena which appear to restore feet to a two-mora minimum, including deletion of penultimate schwa in three syllable words, gemination of final syllable onsets in two-syllable words with a schwa penult, and vowel shift which targets only penultimate schwa. These changes conspired to eliminate subminimal words in multiple Malayo-Polynesian subgroups, and provides an interesting opportunity to motivate drift, a historical phenomenon, as the consequence of constraint interaction.