A Typological Study of the Role of Syllable Contact in Romance Languages*
It is all downhill from here: a typological study of the role of Syllable Contact in Romance languages* 1 Introduction It is a well-known fact that there is a cross-linguistic preference to avoid coda-onset clusters with sonority rise, a tendency known as the Syllable Contact Law after the work by Murray & Vennemann (1983) and Vennemann (1988). This law has been adduced to explain certain diachronic changes (Hooper 1976, Murray & Vennemann 1983, Vennemann 1988, Ham 1998, Martínez-Gil 2003, Holt 2004, Wheeler 2007, among others), but also synchronic phenomena such as epenthesis and epenthesis positioning (Bonet & Mascaró 1997, Rose 2000, Gouskova 2001), consonant strengthening (Colina 1995, Shin 1997, Bonet & Mascaró 1997, Jiménez 1997, 1999, Davis & Shin 1999, Gouskova 2002, 2004), syncope blocking (Urbanczyk 1996, Miglio 1998, Gouskova 2002), word order and subtraction regulation in blend formation (Bat-El 1996), allomorph selection (Hargus 1997, 2007), metathesis (Gouskova 2001), and regressive manner assimilation (Shin 1997, Davis & Shin 1999, the author 2003 [2006], Wheeler 2005).1 The main purpose of this paper is to show that Syllable Contact is responsible for the application of an extensive set of processes drawn from Romance languages and to explore the nature and effects of this constraint within Optimality Theory (OT) on the basis of the analysis of these phenomena. The processes under examination are the following: a) regressive manner assimilation in some varieties of Catalan and in Languedocian Occitan, b) onset strengthening and epenthesis in Catalan, c) alveolar fricative rhotacism in Majorcan Catalan, dialects of Sardinian and dialects of Galician, d) alveolar fricative gliding in Languedocian Occitan, e) strategy selection in word-initial consonant clusters which violate the minimum sonority distance constraints in Catalan, and, finally, f) allomorph selection in Catalan and Spanish.
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