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97 NOTATIONAL CONVENTIONS
Given these forms, and no others, we would probably be tempted to reconstruct
an earlier Romance form of the word for ‘uncle’ as *tiu, with the assumption
that French oncle had been borrowed from somewhere else. It is only
because we know more about the history of the Romance languages (and have
other languages to draw upon besides those mentioned in (5)) that we know that
the Latin word was avunculus, and that the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese
forms derive from a Greek loan-word in Vulgar Latin (Elcock 1960: 162). A
reconstructed *tiu would be a hypothesis about the form of the word for ‘uncle’
which would be only partly correct, a best guess on the basis of the available
evidence. The asterisk marks that status.
Optimality Theory
In Optimality Theory tableaux, an asterisk is used to show a breach of a particular
constraint. If the constraint is broken more than once, more than one asterisk
is used. If the breach of the constraint is fatal (that is, if that particular breach
leads to the candidate under discussion being rejected), the asterisk is followed
by an exclamation mark. A simple example comes from Pater (2000). The two
contradictory constraints concerned are Non-Fin (i.e. Non-final: the head of the
prosodic word, the stressed syllable, must not be final) and Align-Head (Align
the right edge of the prosodic word with the right edge of the head of the prosodic
word, i.e. the stressed syllable). Applied to the word horizon, this gives the tableau
in (6). Output (a) breaks the Align-Head constraint because the stressed syllable
isnot at the right-hand edge of the word; output (b) breaks the same constraint
twice because there are two syllables after the stressed syllable; output (c)
breaks Non-Fin because the stress is final. Since breaking Non-Fin is more
serious than breaking Align-Head, and since (a) breaks Align-Head less than
(b) does, (a) is the optimal candidate here, as indicated by the pointing finger.
(6) Non-Fin �� Align-Head
horizon Non-Fin Align-Head
�
a. ho[rí]zon *
b. [hóri]zon **!
c. [hòri][zón] *!
Autosegmental and Metrical Phonology
In Autosegmental Phonology, an asterisk is used to mark a syllable which has
pitch prominence. Thus in Japanese kokoro ‘heart’ the second syllable is