<OT> New Posting: ROA-822

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 822-0406

"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible": Some reflections on the verbal morphophonology of Balearic Catalan

Claudia Pons <claudia.pons at ub.edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=822


Abstract:
In Balearic Catalan, first person singular present indicative
verb forms do not show an explicit inflectional morph, as
do most dialects of Catalan. Among these forms, we find
final consonantal clusters that involve a violation of the
sonority constraint according to which the degree of sonority
between the segments of a syllable must be decreasing in
relation to the nucleus. The same clusters in nominal inflection
are resolved by means of a process of vowel epenthesis.
The exceptional phonological behavior of these consonant
clusters is not circumscribed to sonority factors, but also
concerns the regular phonology of the dialect, either because
a general process fails to apply, or because a process applies
though the conditions that make it applicable are not visible.
Previous approaches have analyzed these final consonant
clusters, not as codas, but as onsets of an empty nucleus:
this exceptional syllabic status would, according to these
proposals, throw some light on this peculiar phonological
behavior. In this paper we investigate the theoretical problems
deriving from approaches of this kind and demonstrate that
they are better analyzed by considering paradigmatic effects,
such as uniformity and contrast between the members of a
morphological paradigm. Furthermore, the article critically
reviews the different theories developed in Optimality Theory
in order to account for surface resemblances and dissimilarities
between the members of a paradigm, introduces a detailed
formalization of PARADIGMATIC CONTRAST, and compares the
facts of Balearic Catalan to those of other languages which
exhibit a similar behavior, such as Dutch.

Comments: Submitted to a conference proceedings book
Keywords: Catalan verbal morphophonology, empty nucleus, Paradigmatic Contrast (formalization), Optimal Paradigms, Anti-Faithfulness constraints
Areas: Phonology
Type: Manuscript

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=822