Untitled

Boundary markers in phonological theory23nucleus, it follows that consonant final words in fact end in an onsetfollowed by the empty nucleus. In consequence, GP predicts word-finalempty nuclei. Note, however, that since the very beginning this movehas been problematic simply because final empty nuclei lack the licensor.8 In GP empty nuclei do not appear at random but rather their distributionis principle-governed. Thus, in order to remain silent, an emptynucleus must be licensed by the following audible vowel through ProperGovernment 9 or appear in the domain of Interonset Government. 10Since, however, final empty nuclei are not followed by any licensor ordo not appear in any governing domain it means that the only way tomake sure they remain silent is to postulate a parametric licensing (2).(2) Final empty nuclear position is licensed:ON/OFFIn other words, it has been assumed that whether a language allows forsuch final empty nuclei is not related to internuclear configurations, butis controlled by a parameter. If the parametric licensing of the final emptynuclei is set to ON in a language, the language will have words withfinal consonants on the surface, e.g. English, Polish. If the parameter isset to OFF, inaudible final nuclei are disallowed and every word mustend in a vowel, e.g. Italian. Later, the scope of final empty nuclei wasextended to capture the occurrence of domain final empty nuclei in morphologicallycomplex words with the analytic domain structure. It followsthat if parametric licensing has scope over domain-final rather thanword-final empty nuclei, the only difference between, for example, sixths[[[sIksP]TP]sP] and ten [tenP] is the number of empty nuclei, three in theformer case and one in the latter. As has already been mentioned, thissolution is problematic as such nuclei lack the licensor. However, there isanother case which emphasises the peculiar status of final empty nucleiin GP, that is, their ability to government-license consonantal relations(Charette 1990, 1991). For example, English allows for word-finalconsonant clusters, e.g. land, cult, lamp, milk, etc., which means that insuch cases the final obstruent in order to govern the preceding sonorantmust receive the licence from the following (in this case empty) nucleus.8This is also true for empty nuclei preceding the /sC/ clusters, the so-called ‘MagicLicensing context’, see Kaye 1992.9Proper Government is a relation between a nucleus dominating a melody anda nucleus with no phonetic content.10Basically, Interonset Government is a relation between two onsets separated byan empty nuclear position.