It is all downhill from here: the role of Syllable Contact in Romance Languages Clàudia Pons Moll Universitat de Barcelona [email protected]

1 Goal: The purpose of this paper is to explore, on the basis of a quite extensive set of phenomena drawn from Romance languages, the role and the nature of the SYLLABLE CONTACT constraint in Optimality Theory, along the lines of Gouskova (2003). 2 Data: a) Regressive manner assimilation in Catalan and Occitan. In Majorcan & Minorcan Catalan, stops and non-sibilant fricatives assimilate the manner of articulation of the following consonant, except when they are followed by a sibilant segment, in which case they only undergo regressive place assimilation. Sibilant fricatives assimilate the manner of articulation of the following lateral, rhotic or glide and undergo a process of dissimilation when followed by another sibilant. In the other contexts, they are preserved. Nasal segments undergo manner assimilation when followed by a lateral or a glide; otherwise, they maintain their manner specification. Except for some unproductive cases, lateral, rhotic and glide segments never undergo regressive manner assimilation (see Recasens 1991, Bibiloni 1983). In Lengadocian Occitan, final stops assimilate the manner of articulation of the following sonorant and nasals assimilate the manner of articulation of the following lateral or glide (Alibèrt 1976, Wheeler 1988). The emerging generalization is that sonority increase across syllable boundary is leveled out by total assimilation. b) Alveolar sibilant rhotacism in Majorcan Catalan, Sardinian and Galician. In MajC, an optional process of rhotacism of the alveolar sibilant applies when this consonant precedes a non-sibilant voiced obstruent and a nasal; the alveolar sibilant, on the contrary, remains unaltered when precedes a non-sibilant voiceless obstruent (see Recasens 1991 and Bibiloni 1983). The same process applies in some dialects of Sardinian (see Wagner 1951 and Pittau 1972) and Galician (Dubert 1999), among other Romance languages. Interestingly enough, the process applies in the same phonetic environment as in MaC: basically, preceding a voiced consonant. c) Sibilant gliding in Occitan: In some varieties of Occitan, word-final s becomes [j] before consonants other than voiceless stops (Alibèrt 1976, Wheeler 1988). In these cases (b, c), a decreasing sonority value from sibilant to C is not enough and it has to be augmented by increasing the sonority in the coda. d) Consonantal strengthening and internal epenthesis in Catalan. In most Catalan dialects, a process of affrication applies when an alveolar stop is followed by an alveolar sibilant (Jiménez 1997), and a process of epenthesis applies when a verbal stem ending in a consonant (generally a nasal) is immediately followed by the future or the conditional morpheme. Here, sonority increase across syllable boundary is reversed through onset strengthening and epenthesis. 3 Discussion of the data and proposal of analysis: The general assimilatory behavior of MajC & MiC and Lengadocian Occitan can be explained appealing to the interaction between the SYLLABLE CONTACT markedness constraint –which bans coda-onset clusters with an increasing degree of sonority– and the faithfulness constraints that advocate for the preservation of manner specifications of underlying consonants. Indeed: regressive manner assimilation generally applies when the consonant in coda position is less sonorant than the consonant in onset position. The same explanation can be adduced to explain consonantal strengthening and internal epenthesis in Catalan. There are some data, however, that testify that SYLLABLE CONTACT can not be considered a single constraint, but a relational hierarchy against all possible intersyllabic configurations (1) (Gouskova 2003). The processes of rhotacism and gliding listed in (b) and (c) attest that a positive sonority distance in syllabic transitions is not enough; hence constraints against decreasing sonority intersyllabic clusters are also required. The relational hierarchy of (1) formalizes, in OT terms, the Extension of the Syllable Contact Law (Murray & Vennemann 1983) (2). The fact that gliding and rhotacism only apply before a voiced consonant can be easily explained by the activity of the AGREE(voice) constraint.

(1) *Dist -6 » *Dist -5 » *Dist -4 » *Dist -3 » *Dist -2 » *Dist -1 » *Dist 0 » *Dist +1 » *Dist +2 » *Dist +3 » *Dist +4 » *Dist +5 » *Dist +6

(2) «The preference for a syllabic structure A.B, where A and B are segments and a and b are the sonority values of A and B, increases with the value of a minus b.»

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