1 What drives compensatory lengthening? Beyond moraic conservation Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza The Ohio State University Department of Spanish and Portuguese Abstract Compensatory Lengthening (CL) refers to processes where deletion of a segment leads to lengthening of another segment. The deleted segment (trigger) and the lengthened segment (target) can be either a vowel or a consonant. Previous research has focused mainly on cases of vowel lengthening, paying less attention to consonant lengthening. The goal of this paper is to argue for two different motivations driving consonant lengthening in different languages, based on the typological comparison between vowel and consonant lengthening developed in Campos-Astorkiza (2005). Traditionally, CL has been explained through moraic conservation (Hayes 1995), according to which the trigger is always a moraic segment and upon its deletion, the stranded mora is attached to an adjacent element resulting in lengthening. However, moraic conservation has been challenged and, based on typological considerations, the current study argues that not all instances of consonant CL have the same motivation. I propose that phonologization and perceived similarity play a role in different cases. According to the phonologization account (see Kavistskaya 2002 for vowel lengthening), the phonetic consonant duration is reanalyzed as phonological upon loss of the conditioning environment. This analysis is illustrated with data from the Greek dialects of Lesbian and Thessalian. The perceived similarity approach, based on work by Steriade (2001), argues that the result of compensatory lengthening is more similar to the original sequence than the result of only deleting. Hungarian presents a case of compensatory lengthening where perceived similarity offers an explanation to the observed pattern. 2 1. Introduction The term compensatory lengthening (CL) is used in the literature to refer to a process by which deletion of a segment leads to lengthening of another segment. Let us illustrate CL with two examples: Turkish vowel lengthening and Eastern Andalusian Spanish consonant lengthening. In Turkish, optional deletion of /h/ before a continuant or nasal leads to lengthening of the preceding vowel (Sezer 1986). This process in illustrated in (1a), where the two variant pronunciations are included. /h/ preceding an oral stop is not subject to optional deletion (1b), and consequently, no CL applies. (1) Turkish compensatory vowel lengthening (Sezer 1986). (a) [ka hja] ~ [k aːːːja] ‘steward’ [a hmet] ~ [aːːːmet] man’s name (b) [sa hte] ~ *[sa ːːːte] ‘counterfeit’ [so hbet] ~ *[so ːːːbet] ‘chit-chat’ Eastern Andalusian Spanish (EAS) presents a case where obstruent deletion occurs together with lengthening of the following consonant (Gerfen 2001, 2002, Penny 2000), as exemplified in (2a). The deleted segment in EAS is a coda obstruent in preconsonantal position and upon its deletion, the following consonant gets lengthened. It is relevant to notice that in EAS there are morphological alternations where the trigger obstruent surfaces, for example when this consonant occupies a prefix final position and the following stem begins with a vowel (2b). (2) EAS compensatory consonant lengthening 1. (a) [de nn ibel] ‘unevenness’ (/des+nibel/) [su mm arino] ‘submarine’ (/sub+marino/) [bo kk e] ‘forest’ (cf. boske in Standard Peninsular Spanish) (b) [de sato] ‘I untie’ (/des+ato/) [su bordinado] ‘subordinate’ (/sub+ordinado/) In cases of CL, the deleted element is the trigger and the lengthened segment is the target. These two terms, trigger and target, will be used from now on to refer to the segments involved in CL. There are four logically possible types of CL. The target can be either a vowel or a consonant, and the trigger can also be a vowel or a consonant. Table 1 shows these four possibilities. 1 The symbol + stands for a morpheme boundary. 3 Table 1 Four possible types of CL Trigger Target V V C V V C C C There are two main types of CL depending on the target segment: vowel lengthening or consonant lengthening. Previous research has looked mainly at cases of vowel lengthening, paying less attention to consonant lengthening. This paper focuses on consonant lengthening. Its goal is to argue for two distinct motivations driving this type of lengthening in different languages, based on the typological comparison between vowel and consonant lengthening developed in Campos-Astorkiza (2005) . Traditionally, CL has been explained through moraic conservation (Hayes 1989), according to which the trigger is always a moraic segment and upon its deletion, the stranded mora is attached to an adjacent element resulting in lengthening. However, moraic conservation has been challenged and, based on typological considerations, the current study argues that not all instances of consonant CL have the same motivation. I propose that the sound change mechanism of phonologization (defined in section 3.1), and perceived similarity play a role in different cases. According to the phonologization account (see Kavitskaya 2002 for vowel lengthening), the phonetic consonant duration is reanalyzed as phonological upon loss of the conditioning environment. This analysis is illustrated with data from the Greek dialects of Lesbian and Thessalian (see examples in section 3.2 below). The perceived similarity approach, based on work by Steriade (2001), argues that the result of compensatory lengthening is more similar to the original sequence than the result of only deleting. Hungarian presents a case of compensatory lengthening where perceived similarity offers an explanation to the observed pattern (see section 4 below for illustrative examples). The paper is structured as follows. In section 2, I present a typological comparison between compensatory vowel and consonant lengthening with respect to the directionality of the process, adjacency of trigger and target and the type of trigger, based on Campos-Astorkiza (2005). In section 3, the phonologization analysis of compensatory vowel lengthening developed by Kavitskaya (2002) is presented. An extension of this analysis is considered for the phenomenon of consonant lengthening. Section 4 introduces the Theory of Perceived Similarity developed by Steriade (2001) and applies it to some instances of consonant lengthening. In section 5, I present the moraic conservation approach to CL, focusing on the main problems with this account. Section 6 summarizes the main proposal put forth in this paper and suggests venues for future research. 4 2. Typological comparison between compensatory vowel and consonant lengthening In this section, I present a typological comparison between compensatory vowel and consonant lengthening, based on the main generalizations reached by Campos-Astorkiza (2005) 2, which are summarized below. Several differences and similarities are identified with respect to adjacency between the trigger and target, directionality of the process, i.e., where the target and the trigger occur with respect to each other, and type of trigger. 2.1. Adjacency In this section, adjacency requirements between the trigger and the target of CL are examined. In cases of vowel lengthening through consonant loss, the trigger and the target must be strictly adjacent to each other, as we saw in Turkish. Kavitskaya (2002) presents Ancient Greek as an apparent exception. As (3) illustrates, glide deletion in Ancient Greek leads to lengthening of a vowel across an intervening consonant (Ingria 1980, Wetzels 1986). CL in Ancient Greek is considered in more detail in section 3. As for vowel lengthening through vowel deletion, the trigger and the target are not adjacent but separated by an intervening consonant. The scheme CVCV → CV:C represents the behavior of these cases. 3 (3) Ancient Greek compensatory vowel lengthening. *kl injoːːː > [kl iːːːno ːːː] ‘tend’ *p htherjoːːː > [p htheːːːro ːːː] ‘destroy’ The typological evidence gathered in Campos-Astorkiza (2005) indicates that the trigger and the target in consonant lengthening are strictly adjacent in all cases, as Eastern Andalusian Spanish illustrates. There are no instances where the trigger and the target consonant are separated by some other element, i.e., there are no cases of long distance compensatory consonant lengthening. 2.2. Directionality The directionality of compensatory vowel lengthening processes is usually right-to-left. This means that the trigger or deleted segment is to the right of the target or lengthened vowel. The Turkish data in (1) illustrate right-to-left directionality (e.g. [kahja] ~ [ka:ja] ‘steward’). There seem to be some exceptions to this generalization. In some languages, deletion of an onset liquid 2 Campos-Astorkiza’s (2005) generalizations with respect to vowel lengthening are based on Kavitskaya (2002). 3 Note that even if the two vowels are not acoustically adjacent, in articulatory terms they are, given that vowel production is continuous and any intervening consonant is superimposed on the vowels (Öhman 1967, Fowler 1983). Thus, from an articulatory perspective, it could be claimed that the trigger and target are strictly adjacent. 5 leads to lengthening of the following vowel. In these cases the directionality is left-to-right. Languages that exemplify this pattern include Romanesco Italian, Samothraki Greek and Onondaga. In Samothraki Greek, postconsonantal and word-initial /r/ deletes with subsequent lengthening of the following vowel (Kavitskaya 2002, Topintzi 2006). Some illustrative data are given in (4).