In Alcozauca Mixtec, an Otomanguean language spoken in Mexico, the prosodic word is ideally minimally and maximally bimoraic. On the one hand, all monosyllabic stems have a long vowel so that they would be bimoraic, which has been reported across Mixtec varieties. On the other hand, prosodic words that are longer than two moras often undergo truncation and allomorphic alternation to fit into this ideal template that consists of a bimoraic foot, especially in casual speech. In this sense, the bimoraic foot constitutes the perfect prosodic word (Ito and Mester 2015) in Alcozauca Mixtec. A set of prosodic-word size restrictor constraints, namely FOOT-BINARITY, PARSE(mu) and ALL-FEET-RIGHT, is proposed to account for minimality effects (McCarthy and Prince 1994:17); in this paper, it will be shown that maximality effects are also predicted by the same set of constraints, and that such a prediction is borne out in Alcozauca Mixtec. Such an analysis is contrasted with an analysis with a constraint against a non-head foot, *FT- (de Lacy 2003), with an analysis with a cover constraint PERFECT WORD (Ito and Mester 2015), and with an economy constraint *STRUCTURE (Prince and Smolensky 1993); it will be argued that a reductionist approach with the three prosodic-word size restrictor constraints is more appropriate to account for the Mixtec data. Such an approach also makes a typological prediction that maximality always entails minimality, but not vice versa.
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