Sonority distance and similarity avoidance effects in Moroccan Judeo-Spanish

Travis G. Bradley; Jacob J. Adams

doi:10.1515/ling-2018-0028

Article

Sonority distance and similarity avoidance effects in Moroccan Judeo-Spanish

Travis G. Bradley and Jacob J. Adams

Published/Copyright: November 3, 2018

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From the journal Linguistics Volume 56 Issue 6

Abstract

This article investigates consonant gemination in late Nineteenth- and early Twentieth-century haketía, a now moribund, regional dialect of Judeo-Spanish spoken in northern Morocco since the late fifteenth century. Some, but not all, consonant clusters arising across a word boundary undergo regressive total assimilation, e.g. [n.n] siudad ninguna ‘no city’ but [z.n] laz niñas ‘the girls’. We present novel descriptive generalizations to show that regressive gemination is sensitive to the degree of sonority distance between the coda and the onset. Evidence of parasitic harmony comes from lateral+consonant clusters, which undergo gemination only if the target and trigger consonants are already similar in some respect. In the framework of Optimality Theory, we formalize syllable contact as a relational hierarchy of *Distance constraints and capture parasitic harmony effects by similarity avoidance, or Obligatory Contour Principle, constraints against adjacent consonants with identical manner and/or place features. These markedness constraints interact with other universal faithfulness and markedness constraints in a language-specific ranking that predicts the attested patterns of regressive gemination. This study lends further support to sonority distance effects and gradient syllable contact in phonological theory and shows that similarity avoidance is also necessary to give a full account of regressive gemination in Moroccan Judeo-Spanish.

Keywords: Moroccan Judeo-Spanish (haketía); syllable contact; sonority distance; similarity avoidance; Obligatory Contour Principle

Acknowledgements

This work is the culmination of collaborative research that began as the second author’s 2014 undergraduate honors thesis in Linguistics at the University of California, Davis. Previous versions of parts of this article were presented by the second author at the 2014 UC Davis Language Research Symposium and in the 2016 UCLA phonology seminar, by both authors at the 2016 Hispanic Linguistics Symposium at Georgetown University, and by the first author in 2017 for the UC Davis Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Department of Linguistics. For helpful comments and constructive criticism, we would like to thank Robert Blake, Melissa Corbett, Bruce Hayes, Rafael Núñez Cedeño, Ryan Redman, Justin Spence, Kie Zuraw, and four anonymous reviewers. Any remaining shortcomings in the present work are our responsibility. Finally, we are indebted to the late Professor Samuel G. Armistead, who, at UC Davis in the early 2000s, encouraged the first author to take a look at the phonology of Judeo-Spanish.

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Published Online: 2018-11-03

Published in Print: 2018-11-27

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https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2018-0028

Keywords for this article

Moroccan Judeo-Spanish (haketía); syllable contact; sonority distance; similarity avoidance; Obligatory Contour Principle