<OT> New Posting: ROA-802

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 802-0106

It is all downhill from here: The role of Syllable Contact in Romance languages

Clà udia Pons <claudia.pons at ub.edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=802


Abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to explore, on the basis of
a quite extensive set of processes drawn from Romance languages,
the nature and the effects of the SYLLABLE CONTACT constraint
in Optimality Theory. In order to achieve that, we investigate
and formalize a) the process of regressive manner assimilation
that applies in some varieties of Catalan as well as in
Lenguadocian Occitan, 2) the processes of onset strengthening
and epenthesis that occur in Catalan, 3) the process of
's' rhotacism that is found in Majorcan Catalan, in some
dialects of Sardinian and in some dialects of Galician,
among other Romance languages, 4) the process of 's' gliding
that arises in Lenguadocian Occitan, and, finally, 5) the
selection between epenthesis and deletion in word-initial
consonantal clusters violating the minimum sonority distance
constraints in Catalan. The analysis of these processes,
most of them not considered in the literature devoted to
SYLLABLE CONTACT, leads to some important theoretical implication
s: a) SYLLABLE CONTACT should not be regarded as a single
constraint which categorically bans coda-onset clusters
with rising sonority, but it should be decomposed into a
universal hierarchy of constraints targeting all possible
sonority distances between adjacent heterosyllabic segments,
as originally suggested by Murray & Vennemann (1983), formalized
in OT terms by Bat-El (1996) and Gouskova (2001, 2002, 2004),
and applied to Romance languages in Pons (2003b, 2004a,
2005b); b) the sonority scale in Catalan should distinguish
flaps and trills, the latter being less sonorous, as previously
proposed for Catalan and other Romance languages in Bonet
& Mascar� (1997), Parker (2002), Pons (2004a, 2005b); c)
the sonority scale of Catalan should treat separately voiced
and voiceless stops, the latter being less sonorous, as
traditionally put forward in some studies devoted to syllable
structure (see, for instance, Steriade 1982, for Attic Greek;
Davis 1990, for Italian; and Blevins 1995).

Comments: Paper presented at the 13th Manchester Phonology Meeting (May 2005, Manchester) and the Conference on Manner Alternations in Phonology (June 2005, Berlin)
Keywords: Syllable Contact, manner alternations, regressive manner assimilation, rhotacism, gliding, onset strengthening, epenthesis, Romance languages
Areas: Phonology
Type: Conference Handout

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=802