<OT> New Posting: ROA-707

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 707-0105

Coronals and compounding in Irish

Antony D. Green <toniogreen at web.de>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=707


Abstract:
Irish is characterized by a process of lenition, by which
(among other changes) the coronals t, d, s become h, G (gamma),
h under certain morphosyntactically determined circumstances.
Lenition of coronals is blocked (i.e. t, d, s remain unchanged)
after other coronal consonants in certain domains, a phenomenon
known as coronal fusion (CF). In a subset of CF domains
s changes to t rather than remaining s, a phenomenon known
as s-fortition. In this paper, it will be shown that the
domain of CF and s-fortition is the (recursive) prosodic
word, as these two processes are found in right-headed as
well as left-headed compounds, but not in other (noncompound)
left-headed complex NPs. An optimality-theoretic analysis
reveals that CF and s-fortition are motivated by the same
constraint ranking: the phonological requirement that coronal
consonants be followed by other coronal consonants is more
important than the selection of the morphologically correct
mutation grade of a word.

Comments: 
Keywords: Irish, lenition, mutation, coronals, compounding, prosodic structure
Areas: Phonology
Type: Manuscript

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=707