Eliminating Long-Distance Consonantal Spreading.
| Number | 1082 |
|---|---|
| Year | 1998 |
| Drawer | 20 |
| Entry Date | 11/22/1999 |
| Authors | Gafos, D. |
| Contact | |
| Publication | Natural Language and Linguistic Theory . 16, 223-278. |
| url | http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1082.pdf |
| Abstract | Past theoretical analyses have claimed that some languages employ a special type of phonological spreading of a consonant over a vowel, long-distance consonantal spreading. I argue that this type of spreading can and must eliminated from the theory, by reducing it to segmental copying as in reduplication. This elimination is first motivated from a number of perspectives, including considerations of locality and theoretical redundancy. The reduction to reduplication is then developed in detail for Temiar, one of the main indigenous languages of Malaysia, notorious for the complexity of its copying patterns. Crucial to this reduction is the notion of gradient violation of constraints in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993), and the notion of correspondence, with its particular application to reduplication (McCarthy and Prince 1995a). The proposal extends to other languages (e.g. Arabic, Chaha, Modern Hebrew, and Yoruba), where the putative spreading had been thought necessary. The elimination of long-distance consonantal spreading is argued to further obviate two other special mechanisms, also thought to apply on language-particular basis: (a) the representation that segregates vowels and consonants on different planes, known as V/C planar segregation, and (b) the distinct mode of word formation consisting of mapping segments to templates. |
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