Volume 16, Issue 2

This paper provides a broad empirical description and a close examination of how Catalan speakers sillabify sequences of vocoids of rising sonority within the lexicon (e.g., piano ‘piano’, clariana ‘clearing’ or àvia ‘grandmother’). A survey with 381 words administered to 60 speakers has enabled us to identify two distinct varieties of Central Catalan: a more innovative variety (which displays a stronger tendency to glide formation) and a more conservative variety. This situation, together with a certain degree of inter-speaker variation found in the data, reveals the existence of language change in progress. Both varieties display clear prosodic regularities: word-initial positional effects (that is, gliding tends to be blocked in word-initial position; cf. m [i′ɔ] l ‘mewl’, p [i′a] no ‘piano’, d [iə] dema ‘diadem’) and distance-to-stress effects (that is, gliding increases when the distance to the tonic syllable is greater; cf. d [iə] lecte ‘dialect’ vs. d [jə] lectologia ‘dialectology’). These prosodic effects are also strikingly similar to the ones found in Spanish (cf. Hualde 1999). The article shows that this gliding process can be accounted for in a very intuitive way in terms of a correspondence-based OT analysis which captures the prosodic and analogical forces governing this process together with the dialectal and inter-speaker variation found in the data. In OT terms, the difference between the innovative and the conservative varieties will be interpreted as the loss (or weakening) of a prosodic constraint in the innovative variety. Idiolectal variation will be interpreted as the set of analogical/correspondence relationships each speaker establishes with other words in the lexicon.

This paper investigates the process of word-final consonant cluster simplification in Québec French. Three categories of clusters are distinguished: (1) those that may be reduced in all lexical items (unrestricted simplification), (2) those that may be reduced in some lexical items but not in others (lexically-determined simplification), (3) those that are always stable. Consonant deletion is motivated by two distinct factors: the Sonority Sequencing Principle and a principle requiring that every segment be perceptually salient. The likelihood that a consonant deletes correlates with the degree to which it violates one of these principles. Appeal to perceptual factors explains in particular two tendencies. First, final stops are less susceptible to deletion than other consonants. Second, cluster simplification correlates with the amount of contrast within the cluster, in terms of voicing, manner and place of articulation. This analysis of cluster reduction supports the integration of perception in phonological theory advocated in a growing body of work. It is formalized within Optimality Theory and uses in particular perceptually-motivated markedness and faithfulness constraints militating against perceptually weak segments.

Relying on Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) and Correspondence Theory (McCarthy and Prince 1995), this paper presents an analysis of the patterns exhibited by Spanish portmanteaus (e.g., [bɾuxéɾes] ‘mean women’ < [bɾúxa] ‘witch’ + [muxéɾes] ‘women’), which demonstrates that such playful word creations are not generated according to the same principles that govern the grammatical morphology. Instead, portmanteaus are created in the extragrammatical morphology (Dressler 2000), where they are subject to constraints that are ‘distorted’ versions of those found in natural language, and others that are exclusive to playful language. It is also shown that Spanish portmanteaus are endowed with a syntactic/semantic head, which is crucial in order to account not only for their syntactic and semantic properties but also for their phonological form. Despite their non-canonical structure, portmanteaus are subject to well-formedness and faithfulness constraints, which determine that only one of the many possible ways in which the source words may combine is optimal. Yet above well-formedness and faithfulness constraints, there is a principle of recoverability of the source words, which portmanteaus must always respect.

The main goal of this paper is to shed light on the doubling wh structures that many North Eastern Italian dialects exhibit, on the one hand, and on the ‘hidden’ doubling at work in French que questions, on the other. Both constructions we claim should be analysed as the A-bar counterparts of pronominal clitic doubling. The execution of these ideas rests on a highly split left periphery and Remnant movement to the different layers of the CP domain.

This article addresses the phenomenon commonly referred to as “the double access reading” (DAR) of complement clause tenses, which concerns a type of restriction on the reading of the complement in relation to a matrix tense. The restrictions in question have been analyzed previously as deriving from “double anchoring” of the complement tense, both by the matrix event and by utterance time. On the basis of evidence from Spanish and Italian, this article claims that only one of these relations is genuine tense anchoring: anchoring by utterance time. The other relation, “event anchoring” is shown to derive from the role of complement constituents in “measuring out” the aspect of the matrix predicate. Spanish and Italian provide evidence that the distribution of the DAR correlates with aspectual properties of the matrix predicate. This generalization is argued to derive from the capacity of complement clauses to express a temporal “Path” along which a Theme progresses, analogous to Paths expressed by other constituents such as PPs and DPs. Tense anchoring is simplified as a consequence.