<OT> New Posting: ROA-581

[roa@ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 581-0203

Intra-Paradigmatic Homophony Avoidance in Two Dialects of Slavic

Katherine Crosswhite <crosswhi@ling.rochester.edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=581


Abstract:
In this paper, I examine two cases of homophony-avoidance,
one occurring
in the Trigrad dialect of Bulgarian, and the other occurring
in Contemporary
Standard Russian. In both cases, a productive phonotactic
phenomenon of
the language (vowel reduction) is either completely or totally
blocked
just in case its application would cause two morphologically-related
forms
to become homophonous.  Vowel reduction can create homophones
in cases
where the words involved are not morphologically related.
My analysis
of these two cases rests on Correspondence Theory (McCarthy
and Prince
1996, McCarthy 1995).  In particular, the morphological
limitations placed
on Correspondence predict that homophony-blocking cannot
affect non-related
words

Keywords: Correspondence, homophony avoidance, vowel reduction,
Bulgarian, Russian

Areas: Phonology

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=581