Implicational Featural Relations in a Constraint-based Approach

This study analyzes Japanese coalescence, Fijian partial height harmony, and the allophony of German dorsal fricatives within the framework of Optimality Theory and proposes a proper treatment of default segments and default insertions of vocalic place features. In particular, it shows that a constriction-based feature representation with implicational featural relations can eliminate certain rule-like constraints. The implicational relations are the relations held between certain vocalic features and the height feature. It is shown that by using such inter-featural relations within the constraint-based framework, we can not only give a unified account for the cross-linguistic generalizations concerning coalescence and partial height harmony but also explain the unmarked behavior of the cross-linguistically more marked allophone [ç]in German.