Constraints on the metathesis of sonorant consonants in Judeo-Spanish

Abstract

Judeo-Spanish denotes those varieties of Spanish preserved by the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 and have emigrated throughout Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the United States. This paper analyzes several types of sonorant consonant metathesis in Judeo-Spanish within the framework of Optimality Theory. Following Holt's (2004) account of Old Spanish, local metathesis of dl , dn , and nr clusters is analyzed as a repair strategy for bad syllable contact. A novel analysis is proposed in which nasal place assimilation and positional faithfulness constraints account for the failure of dm metathesis in morphologically derived environments. Judeo-Spanish also has two types of innovative rhotic metathesis that cannot be explained in terms of syllable contact. The rd > dr shift is analyzed as an effect of the Obligatory Contour Principle, whereby adjacent segments identical in place, manner, and voicing specifications are prohibited. The second type involves the displacement of r toward the left edge of a word, also frequently attested in popular Modern Spanish. A comprehensive account of rhotic metathesis is developed, following recent work on position-specific constraint evaluation (Riggle and Wilson 2005) and segmental adjacency constraints (Carpenter 2002).