Markedness and Faithfulness in Vowel Systems

Miglio argues that to assess the relative markedness of a segment, frequency of occurrence in vowel inventories is insufficient when considered on its own. In its analysis of the Great Vowel Shift, this book elaborates a more useful model of a unitary change even in a surface-oriented theory such as optimality theory, with the help of local conjunction. Miglio extends the device of local conjunction to model opaque relations, and calls for reranking and lexicon optimization as the means to capture change within optimality theory.

Viola Miglio received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1999. Her research interests include the phonology of Spanish and Romance languages, theoretical phonology, optimality theory, phonetics, and language change. She currently teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Santa Barbara.