Abstract

Degemination in German applies not only in regular but also in irregular verbal inflexion. According to Wiese's (1996) stratal organization for German, these two morphological processes will be placed on two discontinuous levels of lexicon, posing the problem that a rule of degemination disobeys the general restriction in Lexical Phonology (Mohanan 1982, 1986); the domain of a rule may not contain nonadjacent strata. In this paper, I argue that Optimality Theory (and in its more recent versions like Correspondence Theory McCarthy & Prince 1995) provides the solution to this problem in terms of constraints on correspondence relations. More importantly the presented analysis offers a paradigm-based account for the two different strategies of anti- geminates (degemination and schwa-epenthesis) revealing that the otherwise unmotivated deletion and epenthesis within the serial operational theory is due to the uniformity in paradigms between 2. and 3. ps. sg. verbal form. The central role of the constraint Uniform Exponence within the paradigm-based theory is further supported by the contrast between the prefixes in- and un-.