Hart, William. 2019. Crosslinguistic typological evidence for prosodic buffers. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 25.2. 299-321. 

The primary aim of this paper is to provide support for the Generalized Repulsion constraint scheme proposed in Hart (2017) by presenting crosslinguistic typological evidence of all the prosodic buffer types predicted by the scheme. Analogous to McCarthy and Prince’s (1993) Generalized Alignment scheme, repulsion constraints consist of four arguments and are formalized as REPEL(Cat1, Cat2, Edge, Buffer), where the first two arguments are prosodic constituents repelled from one another, the third is the edge at which they are repelled, and the fourth is the minimal distance required between the two, instantiated as a buffer. Since the scope of the scheme is limited by an inventory consisting of five prosodic constituents, it is predicted that constraints defined by each of these five buffer types should be found in actually occurring languages of the world. Starting with segmental buffers in Estonian, Maltese, Palauan and Western Aranda, then moving on to moraic buffers in Hixkaryana, Chimalapa Zoque and Sri Lankan Portuguese Creole, then to syllabic buffers in Latin and Seneca, and to foot-sized buffers in Paumari, and finally to word-sized buffers in English, and including examples from several other analogous languages along the way for each type, this paper presents a wealth of cases to demonstrate that all five predicted buffer types are indeed attested. (University of Seoul, Visiting Professor)

Key words: prosodic repulsion, prosodic buffers, Generalized Alignment, Generalized Repulsion, crosslinguistic typology