Apparent ‘sufficiently similar’ degemination in Catalan is due to coalescence

Eric Bakovic

doi:10.3765/plsa.v2i0.4037

Abstract

Cameron et al. (2010) and Fruehwald & Gorman (2011) present the pattern of homorganic consonant cluster reduction in Catalan as a challenge to Baković’s (2005) theory of antigemination, which predicts that any feature ignored in the determination of consonant identity for the purposes of antigemination in a given language must independently assimilate in that language. I argue that the pattern in Catalan is not a counterexample to this prediction if the reduction process is analyzed as coalescence, following Wheeler (2005), rather than as deletion.

Highlights

Some languages exhibit patterns that may be described as the avoidance of adjacent consonants that are ‘sufficiently similar’
The epenthesis process ignores voicing and the assimilation process acts on this same feature, which led me to claim in Baković (2005) that patterns of ‘sufficiently similar’ adjacent consonant avoidance involve an interaction between completely identical adjacent consonant avoidance and assimilation
Once reduction is properly understood as coalescence rather than as deletion, as already argued by Wheeler (2005), the challenge vanishes

Summary

Introduction

Some languages exhibit patterns that may be described as the avoidance of adjacent consonants that are ‘sufficiently similar’. Anteriority is only contrastive among sibilants, but as Baković & Kilpatrick (2005) demonstrate using static palatography, the past tense suffix in mashed [mæʃt-] is significantly more retracted than it is in (a)massed [mæst] This suggests that anteriority independently assimilates in related contexts in English, due to a further ranking of constraints analogous to those required for voicing assimilation: AGREE(ant) over IDENT(ant). Consider the allomorphy of the Lithuanian verbal prefixes /at/ and /ap/ (Baković 2005, 2007) These assimilate in voicing (/at/ → [ad], /ap/ → [ab]), palatalization (/at/ → [atj], /ap/ → [apj]), or both (/at/ → [adj], /ap/ → [abj]), but there is epenthesis of a vowel (/at/ → [atji], /ap/ → [apji]) when the following stem-initial consonant is one of the ‘sufficiently similar’ consonants /t, d, tj, dj/ (in the case of /at/) or /p, b, pj, bj/ The relevant parts of the factorial typology are summarized in (7)

Cs are identicalf

Conclusion