Author: Broadwell, George Aaron Date: June 02, 1999 Title: Focus alignment and optimal order in Zapotec E-mail: g.broadwell@albany.edu Remarks: This paper was given at the Chicago Linguistic Society and is shortened to meet their page-length requirements. A somewhat fuller discussion of issues in this paper is available on my web page: http://www.albany.edu/anthro/fac/broadwell.htm Abstract: This paper looks at word order variation in San Dionicio Ocotepec Zapotec (SDZ), an Otomanguean language spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico. SDZ normally has head-initial order and prepositional phrases. However, like many other Mesoamerican languages, SDZ shows a phenomenon known as 'pied-piping with inversion', which inverts the order of prepositional phrases when they are fronted for wh-movement. I argue that these facts can be accounted for through the interaction of two violable constraints: One constraint favors candidates where lexical categories precede non-lexical categories within a phrase. The other favors candidates in which a wh-phrase is aligned with the left edge of the S'. I argue that the OT-LFG approach to these data is simpler and more explanatory than various alternatives that involve fixed linear precedence combined with movement. linear precedence combined with movement