Startseite Silent lateral actors: the role of unpronounced nuclei in morpho-phonological analyses
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Silent lateral actors: the role of unpronounced nuclei in morpho-phonological analyses

  • Edoardo Cavirani EMAIL logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 4. November 2022
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Abstract

In Government Phonology and its descendants, there is a direct relation between representational complexity and lateral strength, as only melodically filled nuclei can discharge government and licensing. This relation is only broken in special circumstances, e.g. when lateral actorship is granted by a systemic parameter. In this paper, I provide a normalisation of lateral actorship by showing that the latter's correlation with complexity also holds for some silent nuclei without introducing a dedicated parameter. The hypothesis is that representational complexity does not necessarily correspond to some phonetic event: a non-empty nucleus can be unpronounced, without this impinging on its lateral actorship. Turbidity Theory provides the formal tools for distinguishing between empty and unpronounced nuclei. This follows from splitting the association between melodic and prosodic units into two independent relations - projection and pronunciation. Empty nuclei lack melodic content, whereas unpronounced nuclei only lack the pronunciation relation. This approach is shown to account for disparate phenomena, such as glide mutation in Classic Arabic, inflectional markers spell-out in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and the apparently exceptional behaviour of muta cum liquida clusters in Hungarian and in the Italian dialect of Finale Emilia. This approach also allows for a refinement of our understanding of the so-called yers, as well as for constraining the use of floating melody.


Corresponding author: Edoardo Cavirani, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, E-mail:

This work is funded by FWO Marie Skłstrokodowska-Curie Actions – Seal of Excellence postdoctoral research grant nr.12Z7520N. I would like to thank Jean Lowenstamm for the discussions leading to this paper, Noam Faust and the audience of the Atelier de phonologie (Paris 8/CNRS) for giving me the opportunity to discuss this work, and Guido Vanden Wyngaerd and Engela de Villiers for commenting on and revising a previous version of this paper.


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Published Online: 2022-11-04
Published in Print: 2022-11-25

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