抄録
Licensing/Government-based Phonology and Element Theory typically allow melodically-empty nuclei to be phonetically realized as the most unmarked central vowel in a given vocal space (e.g., 〓 in English, i in Cilungu and 〓 in Japanese). Furthermore, an empty nucleus may be phonetically silent if it is properly governed by its following melodically-filled nucleus (Proper Government: Kaye 1990, Harris 1994). In contrast, following Backley (2009, 2011) and Onuma (2011) this paper assumes that the most central vowel schwa in English is the phonetic manifestation of a particular feature-feature [mass] (|A|)-rather than an empty nucleus. This is attributed to the observation that low and mid vowels-which include [mass]-tend to alternate with schwa as compared with those high vowels which consist of only [dip] (|I|) or [rump] (|U|). An additional consequence of disallowing empty nuclei to phonetically manifest themselves is that there is no need to refer to Proper Government and the final-empty-nucleus parameter (Harris 1994) that prescribe the interpretability of empty nuclei. In place of these principles (which typically refer to precedence relations between nuclei), this paper explains phonological processes involving vowel alternations by referring to only dependency relations holding between phonological categories in order to achieve a degree of theoretical restrictiveness.
