A Typology of Stress- and Foot-Sensitive Consonantal Phenomena1 Carolina González Florida State University DOI: https://doi.org/10.1387/asju.18680 Abstract This article investigates consonantal alternations that are conditioned by stress and/ or foot-structure. A survey of 78 languages from 37 language families reveals three types of consonantal phenomena: (i) those strictly motivated by stress (as in Senoufo lengthen- ing), (ii) those exclusively conditioned by foot structure (as in /h/ epenthesis in Huariapano), and (iii) those motivated both by stress and foot structure (as in flapping in American Eng- lish). The fact that stress-only and foot-only consonantal phenomena are attested alongside stress/foot structure conditioned phenomena leads to the proposal that stress and foot struc- ture can work independently, contradicting the traditional view of foot structure organiza- tion as signaled by stress-based prominence. It is proposed that four main factors are at play in the consonantal phenomena under investigation: perception, duration, aerodynamics, and prominence. Duration, aerodynamics and perceptual ambiguity are primarily phonetic, while prominence and other perceptual factors are primarily phonological. It is shown that the mechanism of Prominence Alignment in Optimality Theory captures not only consonan- tal alternations based on prominence, but can also be extended to those with durational and aerodynamic bases. This article also makes predictions regarding unattested stress/foot sensi- tive alternations connected to the four factors mentioned above. Keywords: stress; foot structure; consonantal alternations; phonological typology; percep- tion; duration; aerodynamics; prominence; Prominence Alignment; Optimality Theory. 1 This is a revised version of chapters 1-3 and 6 of my Ph.D. dissertation, The effect of prosodic struc- ture in consonantal processes (University of Southern California, 2003). Part of this research was sup- ported by a post-doctoral grant from the Basque Government (Departamento de Educación, Universi- dades e Investigación) for the year 2003-2004. I am indebted to Rachel Walker, Kie Zuraw, Dani Byrd, Abigail Kaun and Mario Saltarelli for their comments and discussion. Thanks also to audiences at LSA, NELS, USC Phon Lunch and SWOT for their feedback. All errors are my responsibility. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Susana Ciz-Hazard, who passed away not long after com- pleting her Ph.D. dissertation. ISSN: 0582-6152 — e-ISSN: 2444-2992 ASJU 47-2 (2013 [2018]), 87-210 http://www.ehu.es/ojs/index.php/ASJU/ DOI: https://doi.org/10.1387/asju.18680 88 CAROLINA GONZÁLEZ 1. Introduction The influence of stress and foot structure has been well studied for a few conso- nantal phenomena. For instance, stress influences the length and strength of aspira- tion in onset voiceless stops in English (Turk 1993), and flapping of /t, d/ occurs in unstressed syllables in American and Canadian English (Kahn 1980, Turk 1992). In Norton Sound Yupik, fortition appears to be foot-sensitive rather than stress-sensi- tive (Van de Vijver 1998), as is the epenthesis of /h/ in Huariapano (Parker 1994, 1998). Nevertheless, the influence of stress and foot structure on consonantal phe- nomena has not been studied in broad-based terms, and there is no exhaustive survey or classification of the types of consonantal alternations that are conditioned by these metrical considerations. This investigation aims to fill this gap. It presents an extensive survey of over 78 languages from 37 language families with stress- and foot-sensitive consonantal alternations.2 It examines the types of consonantal phenomena that are influenced by stress and foot structure and explores the possible factors that underlie them. It also makes a number of generalizations concerning these processes, including the specific stress and footing environments in which consonantal phenomena are conditioned cross-linguistically, the types of segments and syllabic positions that are preferentially targeted (laryngeal consonants and onsets), and the relevance of positional factors. Thus, this study contributes to the understanding of the possible manners in which stress and footing interact with segmental processes, and, more generally, to the rela- tionship between stress and foot structure. Additionally, this paper puts forward three main theoretical proposals concern- ing the factors behind the consonantal alternations surveyed, the nature of the rela- tionship between stress and foot structure, and the analysis of stress- and foot-sensi- tive consonantal phenomena in Optimality Theoretic terms. It is proposed that four factors are at work in stress- and foot-sensitive consonantal phenomena: perception, duration, aerodynamics, and prominence. While aerodynamics, duration and per- ceptual ambiguity are primarily phonetic (but can be phonologized in some cases), prominence and other perceptual factors are primarily phonological. In some cases, various factors can be at work in a single consonantal phenomenon; in others, a con- sonant alternation might be ambiguous as to the factors that condition it. The second theoretical proposal is that stress and foot structure are separately needed to characterize the range of conditioning contexts for the consonantal phe- nomena surveyed. The survey evidences three different types of consonantal phenom- ena: stress-only cases (as in frication in Noth-Central Peninsular Spanish), stress/foot structure cases (as in flapping in American English), and foot-only cases (as in dele- tion in Capanahua). The finding that consonantal processes can be influenced strictly by stress and strictly by footing leads to the proposal that stress and foot structure are separate. Even if stress and footing might coincide, they are independent, as suggested by cases where foot structure is independent of stress (as in Panoan languages) and where stress is independent of footing (as in Senoufo). This contradicts the traditional 2 This paper reports four additional languages not included in González (2003): Cashinawa (P anoan), Chacobo (Panoan), Guajajára (Tupí-Guaraní), and Urarina (Isolate). ISSN: 0582-6152 — e-ISSN: 2444-2992 ASJU 47-2 (2013 [2018]), 87-210 http://www.ehu.es/ojs/index.php/ASJU/ DOI: https://doi.org/10.1387/asju.18680 A TypOLOGY OF STRESS- AND FOOt-SenSITIVE CONSONANTAL PHENOMENA 89 view of foot structure organization as signaled necessarily by stress-based prominence. While stress can be one of the possible ways in which languages organize syllables into groups, there are other ways which are available in order to achieve this aim, including vowel alternations, tonal phenomena, and consonantal alternations. A third proposal concerns the analysis of stress- and foot-sensitive consonantal phenomena. This paper proposes that Prominence Alignment can be successfully deployed to capture prominence reduction and augmentation for consonantal phe- nomena in both stress- and foot-sensitive contexts. Additionally, it is proposed that Prominence Alignment can be extended to account for phonological consonantal phenomena with durational and aerodynamic bases; while it is generally recognized that durational and aerodynamic constraints play a role in phonological analyses, these constraints have often been left unformulated. The organization of this paper is as follows. Section 2 lays out the theoretical framework of this study, briefly discussing Optimality Theory, the metrical theory of stress, and the separation between phonetics and phonology. Section 3 reports on an extensive cross-linguistic survey of consonantal processes where stress and/or foot structure are influential. This section is divided in three parts. Section 3.1 discusses the sources of the survey; section 3.2 is an overview; and sections 3.3-3.9 comprise the survey, organized according to the type of consonantal phenomena influenced by stress and/or footing. Section 4 discusses the typological generalizations that arise from this survey, including the specific stress and footing environments in which consonantal phenomena are conditioned cross-linguistically, the types of segments and syllabic positions that are preferentially targeted in these consonantal phenom- ena, and the relevance of positional factors. This section also discusses the three pro- posals previewed above, concerning the factors at work in stress- and foot-sensitive consonantal processes, the independence of stress and foot structure, and the exten- sion of Prominence Alignment to account for prominence, durational and aerody- namic consonantal phenomena. Section 5 presents some conclusions and section 6 directions for further research. 2. Theoretical framework This section briefly discusses the theoretical framework of this investigation: Op- timality Theory (2.1), the metrical theory of stress (2.2), and the separation between phonetics and phonology (2.3). 2.1. Optimality Theory This investigation is couched within Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smo- lensky 1993). One of its central tenets is that phonological processes are not ob- tained by rules, but by universal constraints that operate over output forms in lan- guages. Constraints are potentially opposing forces that may stand in tension with each other; cross-linguistic differences between languages are due to different ways of resolving these tensions. In OT this is expressed by different rankings of these con- straints in a hierarchy. A claim of classic OT is that there are just two levels: input (roughly corresponding