Identity avoidance and constraint interaction: the case of Cantonese

This paper Explores various phenomena of identity avoidance in Cantonese an d argues that both pausing and omission play a significant role in avoiding identity of elements. The descriptive generalization is that in Cantonese if two adjacent morphemes are phonologically identical, add a pause between the two morphemes to rephrase the intonational phrase if possible to avoid the repetition. If pausing is impossible, don't do anything adjust tolerat e the identity,. If two adjacent homophonous morphemes belong to the same t ype of functional category, then omit one of the homophonous morphemes. Bot h phonological information and morphological information are needed to calc ulate the violation of identity. Universal grammar provides an output constraint against phonological repeti tion of elements in natural language. Under the optimality-theoretical appr oach, violations of such a constraint may be tolerable to satisfy some high er-ranked constraints. Omission is regarded as a last-resort strategy of id entity, avoidance. A harmonic scale of haplology in natural languages can be derived from rite findings of this paper: omission of functional morphemes is more harmonic than omission of lexical morphemes. It is conjectured that the harmonic sca le should be universal.