This paper develops a comprehensive optimality-theoretic analysis of a Japanese reversing argot. Similar to other types of prosodic-morphological word formation, the argot shows the activation of constraints defining phonological unmarkedness. This manifests itself in the emergence of optimal prosodic form, within the limits imposed by a game-specific reversal requirement. The latter is formally characterized as Cross-Anchoring, a playful variation of the normal correspondence-theoretic anchoring constraints that are part of the phonological grammar. Under the combined pressure of Cross-Anchoring and high-ranking prosodic form constraints, the argot distorts each ordinary-language base word in the minimal way, otherwise echoing it as faithfully as possible. As an important theoretical result, the analysis presents empirical evidence that prosodic faithfulness needs to be gauged in terms of foot-structural roles and not (or not exclusively) in terms of whole foot-sized constituents. Overall, the study demonstrates that the notion of
minimal distortion
operative in argot formation is none else but the principle of minimal violation of a set of ranked constraints, the fundamental tenet of Optimality Theory.
The names of the authors appear in alphabetical order. For helpful comments and suggestions on the topic, we would like to thank John Alderete, Jill Beckman, Mike Hammond, Bruce Hayes, Mark Hewitt, René Kager, Motoko Katayama, Keiko Kojima, Haruo Kubozono, Shigeyuki Koroda, Jason Merchant, Scott Myers, David Perlmutter, Bill Poser, Geoff Pullum, Lisa Selkirk, Junko Shimoyama, Philip Spaelit, Koichi Tateishi, and Suzanne Urbanczyk, as well as three anonymous reviewers. For extensive advice and discussion on an earlier version of this paper, we are grateful to John McCarthy, Jaye Padgett, Alan Prince, Paul Smolensky, and Moira Yip. Our thanks also go to the Japanese community in Rochester, New York, especially to the teachers and parents at the Rochester Japanese School, New York, for their help in the pilot experiment. This work was partially supported by faculty senate grants from the University of California at Santa Cruz and by the National Science Foundation under grant SBR-9510868 to the first and third authors.