In this paper our endeavour is to tie up constraint re-ranking with a prosodic category, namely the syllable. More particularly, we attempt to show that the constraint re-ranking underlying phonological processes discussed in Kubozono (2003) can be minimized and the same can be determined by the weight of the first syllable or the head syllable and is not idiosyncratic to lexical items as shown in the paper.

The paper will be organized as follows. Section one provides a summary of the relevant literature, namely Ito and Mester (1992), Kubozono (2002) and the Iambic-Trochaic Law whose robustness can be questioned. Section two outlines our analysis in the context of cited literature. Sections three through seven present our analyses of the processes in Japanese. Section eight provides some concluding remarks.