Kurpian glides

Abstract

Abstract This article addresses the problem of vowel-generated glides in Kurpian. In general, glides come from two sources: Gliding and Glide Insertion, for instance, word-initial /#iVC/ → [jVC] and /#iC/ → [jiC], where V stands for a vowel and C for a consonant. Even though Gliding and Glide Insertion are different phonological operations, they are united by a single goal: to eliminate onsetless syllables because a glide, regardless of whether it comes from a vowel or from insertion, provides an onset to a syllable. Onset-driven effects are particularly rich in Kurpian because they involve all kinds of vowels, including /a/ but not /ɛ/, a situation that has not been noted in the past research on crosslinguistic typologies (Levi, Susannah V. 2004. The representation of underlying glides: A cross-linguistic study. Seattle, WA: University of Washington dissertation, Levi, Susannah V. 2008. Phonemic vs. derived glides. Lingua 118. 1956–1978; Rosenthall, Sam. 1994. Vowel/glide alternation in a theory of constraint interaction. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts dissertation; Sands, Kathy. 2004. Patternings of vocalic sequences in the world’s languages. Santa Barbara, CA: University of California, Santa Barbra dissertation). Further, glides are found both word-medially and word-initially. In this regard, Kurpian is different from Standard Polish, which tolerates both hiatus and word-initial onsetless syllables. It is argued that the constraint interaction required cannot be accounted for in classic Optimality Theory (OT). The solution is to adopt Derivational OT.