OPPOSITE CONSTRAINTS - LEFT AND RIGHT FOCUS-ALIGNMENT IN KANAKURU

It is a distinctive feature of OT (Prince and Smolensky, 1993) to allo w for the co-existence in one grammar of perfectly opposite constraint s. This paper shows that rather than being the uninteresting OT-equiva lent of the parameters of the Government and Binding tradition (Chomsk y, 1981), such constraint-pairs make crucial distinctions among the tw o frameworks. With this goal in mind, I examine the Chadic language Ka nakuru (Tuller, 1992), arguing that leftward and rightward structural focus alternate in systematic ways. I then show how such a mixed patte rn follows precisely from the existence in UG of two constraints speci fying opposite alignment-directions for structural contrastive focus. The same constraints are also responsible for the uniform focus patter ns of languages like Podoko and Italian (Tuller, 1992; Belletti and Sh lonsky, 1995; Samek-Lodovici, 1996, 1997a).