Asymmetries and generalizations in the repair of early French minimally-rising syllable-contact clusters Francisco Antonio Montaño, Lehman College (CUNY)
The Gallo-Romance (GR) (5th-10th c.) reflexes of Late Latin syncope (Pope 1952; Dumas 1993; Hartkemeyer 2000) provide a unique perspective into the interaction of sonority and phonotactic markedness constraints with faithfulness constraints within the phonology. With the deletion of a pre-tonic or post-tonic short vowel in GR syncopated forms, the preservation, modification, and loss of stranded consonants and neighboring segments occurring in unique clustering permutations reveal a range of repairs on resulting syllable-contact clusters (SCCs). While falling-sonority (manica > manche 'sleeve') and sufficiently-rising obstruent-liquid clusters (tabula > table 'table') unsurprisingly resyllabify without issue into either licit hetero- (SCC) or tautosyllabic (onset) clusters, preserving all consonantal material in the syncopated output, minimally-rising clusters whose final segment is a sonorant undergo diverse repairs to escape eventual total loss, attested only for SCCs containing obstruent codas via gemination then degemination, in avoidance of obstruent-obstruent SCCs (radi[ts]ina > ra[ts]ine 'root', debita > dette > dete 'debt'). Minimally-rising clusters (obstruent-nasal, sibilant-liquid, nasal-liquid), unharmonic both as heterosyllabic clusters due to rising sonority and as onset clusters due to an excessively shallow rise in sonority, undergo a range of phonological repairs including assibilation (platanu > pla[ð]ne > plasne 'plane tree'), rhotacization (ordine > ordre 'order'), and stop epenthesis (cisera > cisdre 'cider'; cumulum > comble 'peak'; camera > chambre 'room'; molere > moldre 'grind.INF' but cf. /rl/ without epenthesis, e.g. merula > merle 'blackbird', evidencing its falling sonority), in order to conform to licensing requirements within the syllable and phonological word (Montaño 2017). Changes in manner accompanying syncope are not unique to minimally-rising clusters. The demands of the articulatorily-grounded phonotactic constraint against [tl]/[dl] clusters likewise results in rhotacization of /l/ upon syncope (epistula > epistre 'epistle', titulum > titre), while the simplification of /ts/ affricates in syncopated lexical items shows sensitivity to both phonotactics (*[tl]) and sonority requirements ([*sr]). When brought into contact with /l/ by syncope, /ts/ exhibits an assibilatory reflex (gra[ts]ile > graisle, *[tl] 'skinny'), but when preceding a rhotic, fortition occurs (vin[ts]ere > veintre, *[sr] 'conquer') (cf. Lahrouchi 2019). In my analysis, fortition, assibilation, rhotacization, and epenthesis represent distinct manifestations of how GR conspires to adapt all of these cluster types to existing harmonic patterns within the language, while preserving as much consonantal material as possible. My constraint-based analysis likewise elucidates important phenomenological connections among these early French cluster repairs in a unified representation of the late GR phonological system with respect to consonant cluster licensing. To capture the facts of these diverse phenomena within a single, cohesive account, I appeal to the rich network of implicational structural relationships between constraints on margin segments in the syllable and phonological word captured by the Split Margin Approach to the Syllable (SMA) (Baertsch 2002; Baertsch & Davis 2003; and later work). The SMA evaluates SCCs with word-domain constraints on adjacent coda (inner margin: M2) and first onset (outer margin: M1) sequences (*M1M2]ω). In my application of this approach, the interaction of split-margin constraints with competing faithfulness constraints reveals how and why particular repairs apply to seemingly dissimilar clusters, while explaining superficial gaps in the application of repairs when processes overlap. Of particular interest to the GR phenomena cited above are [s.l] SCCs. These clusters rank intermediately on the split-margin markedness hierarchy, between other rising-sonority clusters that exhibit stop epenthesis, e.g. /sr/ and /ml/ clusters (*R1S2]ω » *L1S2]ω » *L1N2]ω); in other words, though the sonority profile of /sl/ is more harmonic than /sr/, it is still less harmonic than /ml/ clusters, and yet no repair applies. It is thus unexpected for /sl/ clusters to transmit faithfully into Old French (cf. isle [iz.lə]), eventually fitting the structural requirements for the well-known Old French coda /s/ deletion phenomenon ([i:.lə], cf. contemporary French île) (Gess 1998 and later work). This apparent gap in GR stop epenthesis is elegantly explained when examined
Latin ordine → late GR/early OF ordre [ɔr.drə]
) V -
σ ω σ ω ] ] ] ]
2 2
/ordine/ 2 2
V
ONTIG N R R O - COPE MANNER 1 1 1 1 C ( AX - EP YN S *O *N O *3µ M D ID *O *O a. ɔr.di.nə *! * b. ɔr.dnə *! * * c. ɔrd.nə *! * * * through the lens Fof d. markednessɔr.drə constraints triggering * manner ** *change * in other illicit cluster types, namely those underlyinge. ɔd.nə GR rhotacization *! and the** assibilation reflex of affricate simplification (*[ts.l] > [s.l]). Inf. ɔ/sl/r.də clusters, the contexts for manner**! change (assibilation* or rhotacization) and g. ɔr.də.nə (*!) *! * * * stop epenthesis overlap , and so it interestingly results in the failure of both phonological repairs and the unexpected tolerance of /sl/ SCCs in surface form: GR /isola/ > [iz.lə]
) V )
-
]
IG
ω ω DL ω σ ω ]
]
]
/isola/ ] ] 2 2 2
V C 2 2 PLACE ]/[ ONT S S ( - - S L S 1 1 MANNER 1 C 1 1 AX TL ( -
EP EP EP YNCOPE D S D *S O M D *[ I *R *L D *N *O a. i.zo.lə *! b. i.zlə *! * c. iz.blə *! * * * Fd. iz.lə * * e. iz.drə * *! * * f. iz.dlə * *! * * g. id.lə * *! * h. iz.rə * *! * i. i.drə * **! j. iz.nə * **! * k. i.lə **! l. i.zə.lə (*!) *! * *
My analysis captures the two phonological repairs' overlap and the consequences thereof by comprehensively examining a wide variety of GR word-medial SCCs and the constraint interactions to whichThis is because all possible repairs incur a fatal violation: they are subject. It provides broad evidence within GR that /sl/ clusters are uniquely positioned forepenthesis violates phonotactics (/sl/ preservation, despite sonority,→ [z.dl], violating *since all available[TL]/[DL] )repairs incur violations more severe than the marked structure any of these aims to escape. Rhotacization would yield illicit [s.r], exacerbating the split-margin violation, both fortition and epenthesis would yield illicit [(s)t.l], violating phonotactics, and the joint application of epenthesis plus rhotacization, which would yield a cluster otherwise attested as the output of /stl/ (e.g. epistula > epistre), infringes too egregiously on faithfulness to be optimal. The GR phonology's toleration of /sl/ clusters thus falls out from the analysis, without needing to stipulate any special exceptions for sibilant-liquid clusters (/sl/ or /sr/, contra Lahrouchi 2019). The final outcome of my analysis is an informative schematization of GR consonant cluster licensing that succeeds in capturing the facts and interaction between seemingly disparate phenomena over a wide range of cluster types.
References Baertsch, Karen. 2002. An optimality-theoretic approach to syllable structure: the split margin hierarchy. PhD thesis, Indiana University. Baertsch, Karen, and Stuart Davis. 2003. The split margin approach to syllable structure. ZAS Papers in Linguistics 32. 1-14. Dumas, Denis. 1993. Old French and constraints on consonant epenthesis. Historical Linguistics 1991. 99-110. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gess, Randall. 1998. Old French NoCoda effects from constraint interaction. Probus 10. 207-18. Hartkemeyer, Dale. 2000. An OT approach to atonic vowel loss patterns in Old French and Old Spanish. New approaches to old problems: Issues in Romance historical linguistics, 65-84. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lahrouchi, Mohamed. 2019. Headedness and licensing constraints in the phonotactics of (Old) French. Paper presented at Phonology Theory Agora, The Balance Between Universals and Variation in Grammar, March 2019, Nice, France. Montaño, Francisco. 2017. An optimality-theoretic split-margin approach to the evolution of consonant clusters in historical French phonology. PhD thesis, Indiana University. Pope, Mildred Katharine. 1952. From Latin to Modern French with especial consideration of Anglo-Norman (2nd ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press.