Prevocalic faithfulness

Looking at data from Polish and Ukrainian, this paper addresses the problem of positional faithfulness, in particular onset faithfulness. It is argued that onset faithfulness in its current understanding makes wrong predictions, because it extends the status of privilege to any consonant in the onset. The correct theory is more restrictive and treats as special only the segments that stand before a vowel: prevocalic faithfulness. A further restriction is that the vowel must constitute a syllable nucleus. In effect, then, prevocalic faithfulness refers to onsets, but restricts them to the segment directly before the nucleus.