Glide-high vowel alternations at the syntax-phonology interface (original) (raw)

Glide-high vowel alternation at the syntax-phonology interface

The Handbook of Berber Linguistics, 2024

Berber languages present a wealth of intricate phonological alternations involving glides and high vowels, some of which still resist standard phonological analyses. Glides typically appear in the immediate vicinity of a vowel, in complementary distribution with the corresponding high vowels: e.g. Tashlhiyt Berber gru ‘pick up’ vs agraw ‘assembly’, bri ‘crush’ vs abraj ‘crushed seeds’. Based on this kind of observations, standard theories analyse glides and high vowels as phonetic reflexes of the same underlying segments. The problem arises with the corresponding dative forms grujas ‘pick to him’ and brijas ‘crush seeds to him’. Followed by a vowel-initial morpheme –as, U and I should normally surface as glides, leading to *grwas and *brjas. The key to understanding this paradox lies, we argue, in the morpho-syntactic structure of dative formations. We show that vP corresponds to a phase where U and I are spelled-out as high vowels before the enclitic –as is added. The resulting hiatus is then resolved by means of j-epenthesis, leading to grujas and brijas. External evidence for the hypothesis that non-alternating high vowels and the dative enclitic reside in distinct syntactic domains is drawn from emphasis spread. We show that the projections of category-forming heads, including vP and nP, are the maximal domain of emphasis spread in Tashlhiyt Berber.

"Within-Category" Consonant-Vowel Interactions in Tashlhit: Labialised Consonant Alternations

Korangy, A. and Bensoukas, K. (eds.), The Handbook of Berber Linguistics, 25-54. Springer Handbooks in Languages and Linguistics. Springer, Singapore. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-981-99-5690-6\_2 , 2024

Tashlhit Berber presents two distinct, within-category C-V interactions involving the labialized velar and uvular consonants (Cw). First, these consonants undergo a dissimilation process mainly in the vicinity of the round vowel u- and the round glide w sporadically. This by now established dissimilatory phenomenon is a mundane, within-category C-V interaction. Second, labialized consonants also participate in a very intricate derounding phenomenon to be kept separate from dissimilation on account of the notable differences between the two. Offering an Optimality-Theoretic analysis, the paper argues that while Cw-dissimilation, tautologically, involves a dissimilatory process, Cw-assimilation “derounds” labialized consonants as a side-effect of an assimilatory, vowel-copying operation. When entrapped in a vowel copying domain flanked by the agreeing unrounded vowels ([a…a] or [i…i]), labialized consonants deround in a rather assimilatory context. The latter process is an example of the impossible, or at best rare, within-category C-V interactions predicted by Padgett (2011: 1763).

Epenthesis, Metathesis and Vowel-Glide Alternation: Prosodic Reflexes in Mabalay Atayal

1999

The Atayal language has had minimal analysis done at the prosodic level and that which has been done has merely been descriptive. Theoretically, former analyses of prosody have been carried out in a serial manner, dealing first with syllabification, then going on to analyze footing and stress assignment. This serial approach prevented the analyst from observing the causal relationship between footing and such prosodic reflexes as epenthesis, metathesis, and vowel-glide alternations, as seen in the Mabalay data. Those analysts who made the connection had no formal theory in which to express it. Optimality Theory, as set forth by Prince and Smolensky (1993) and McCarthy and Prince (1993a), approaches the problem from a parallelist perspective, allowing us to see the effects of integrated prosodic constraints directly on the surface forms. This research ties epenthesis, metathesis, and vowel-glide alternations together as prosodic reflexes predominantly of footing constraints. This Ata...