Bibliography

Iosad, Pavel, “Welsh svarabhakti as stem allomorphy”, Transactions of the Philological Society 115:2 (2015): 141–175.

  • journal article
Citation details
Contributors
Article
“Welsh svarabhakti as stem allomorphy”
Volume
115
Pages
141–175
Description
Abstract (cited)

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 and topics
Contributors
Dennis Groenewegen
Page created
April 2019