Extrametricality and weightless segments: a natural account of unnatural phenomena
Nikolaus Ritt
Vienna University
When it comes to capturing phonotactic generalisations or predicting stress placement, it is usually considered practical to label some phonological constituents as "extrametrical" or "weightless". While this procedure certainly appears to work, notions such as 'extrametricality' or 'weightlessness' remain nevertheless somewhat puzzling and their explanations often involve circular reasoning. This paper takes a generalised Darwinian approach to the phenomenon. It regards constituents of phonological knowledge as cognitive replicators, which replicate through being expressed in utterances and imitated in language acquisition. Like all replicators, also phonological constituents are subject to Darwinian selection. From a Darwinian point of view, phonotactic regularities and/or preferences arise essentially because phonological constituents which often express together are likely profit from being adapted to each other as well. This must be so because they represent environmental constants to each other. Crucially, however, knowledge constituents can exert pressure on one another only via their expressions. It will be argued that the extrametricality or weightlessness of phonological constituents reflects the fact that they lack prototypical expressions. If this is true, the fact that they fail to exert adaptive pressure on the constituents that co-express and co-replicate with them is no surprise: that their expressions are too variable to adapt to will make them "invisible" to other replicators in the phonological system.