I argue that noniterativity in phonology always emerges from the interaction of independent factors (adjacency of trigger and target, uniqueness of target, etc.) and never from a requirement that a process may occur just once. (Follow the link below for a more detailed abstract.) The dissertation contains, among other things, more recent and elaborated analyses of the Lango and Umlaut papers/handouts below and a condensed version of the Peak Delay paper.
In Lango's vowel harmony, [+ATR] spreads leftward from suffixes to roots, but only the last root vowel is targeted. I argue that what looks like noniterative vowel harmony is instead best understood as root licensing.
Licensing and Noniterative Harmony in Lango (2008) Proceedings of NELS 37.
This paper contains a distillation of the harmony facts and the basic parts of the analysis.
The Nature of Iterativity: Evidence from Lango (2006) Dissertation prospectus, UCSC.
This is a longer version of the preceding paper. The data and analysis are presented in more detail, and there's some discussion of other noniterative phenomena.
In Chamorro umlaut, prefixes cause root-initial vowels to be fronted, but only if the root-initial vowel is stressed. This seems to contradict Positional Faithfulness because strong positions (stressed syllables) undergo umlaut, but weak postions (unstressed syllables) resit it. I argue that umlaut is a response to the convergence of two dimensions of weakness: The syllable that triggers umlaut is always an immediately pretonic affix. Affixes are weak elements compared to roots, and evidence from Chamorro suggests that (in this language at least) immediately pretonic syllables are also weak. Umlaut, which is driven by positional licensing constraints, is a way to place a feature from this doubly weak position in a more prominent position.
Umlaut also optionally targets a certain kind of secondary stress. The analysis uses Stratal OT to account for this.
Stress is the Trigger of Chamorro Umlaut. To appear in Proceedings of the 2007 Mid-America Linguistics Conference.
Pretonic Non-Prominence in Chamorro Umlaut. (2008) Handout from paper presented at the Old World Conference in Phonology 5, Toulouse, France.
Peak Delay and Tonal Noniterativity (2008)
Myers (1999) presents evidence that noniterative tone spread in Chichewa is just peak delay, whereby a high pitch target is not reached until after the phonologically high-toned syllable. This paper formalizes peak delay in an OT analysis to account for tone spread in Chichewa and tone shift in Kikuyu. It is suggested that peak delay may be behind other reported cases of noniterativity in tone.
The Syllable as Contour Tone Host (2007) in Phonology at Santa Cruz 7.
This paper argues for the position that the syllable is the universal tone-bearing unit, even in the face of evidence that the mora is the TBU in at least some languages.
Tonal and Morphological Identity in Reduplication (to appear) Proceedings of BLS.
Long-Distance Wh-Movement in Chamorro (to appear) Proceedings of AFLA 12.
Vowel Length and Coda Cluster Interactions in Misantla Totonac (2006) Proceedings of of the 29th Penn Linguistics Colloquium vol. 12.1.
Long-Distance Wh-Movement and Minimalism (2005) Qualifying Paper, UCSC.
Patterns of Relativization and Recent Formulations of Markedness (2002) Undergraduate Honors Thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.