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- Title
Welsh svarabhakti as stem allomorphy.
- Authors
Iosad, Pavel
- Abstract
In this paper I propose an analysis of the repairs of sonority sequencing violations in South Welsh in terms of a non-phonological process of stem allomorphy. As documented by Hannahs (2009), modern Welsh uses a variety of strategies to avoid word-final rising-sonority consonant clusters, depending in part on the number of syllables in the word. In particular, while some lexical items epenthesise a copy of the rightmost underlying vowel in the word, others delete one of the consonants in a cluster. In this paper, I argue that at least the deletion is not a live phonological process, and suggest viewing it as an instance of stem allomorphy in a stratal Optimality Theory (OT) framework (Bermúdez-Otero 2013). This accounts for the lexical specificity of the pattern, which has been understated in the literature, and for the fact that cyclic misapplication of deletion and diachronic change are constrained by part-of-speech boundaries.
- Subjects
SONORANTS (Phonetics); OPTIMALITY theory (Linguistics); MORPHOPHONEMICS; HISTORICAL linguistics; WELSH language
- Publication
Transactions of the Philological Society, 2017, Vol 115, Issue 2, p141
- ISSN
0079-1636
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/1467-968X.12085