Coronal Unmarkedness and Clusters in Correspondence Theory.

This paper examines paradoxes involving coronal specification. Although several phonological phenomena such as place assimilation, insertion and deletion argue for coronal underspecification, other facts like morpheme structure conditions demand coronal specification. This paper shows that this problem can be solved with the markedness hierarchy which ranks coronals low under Correspondence Theory. The hierarchy also accounts for the distributional bias of coronals in word clusters without appealing to Yip's Cluster Condition and coronal underspecification. 1.