Phonology-morphology opacity in Harmonic Serialism

Abstract

In this paper I defend the idea that prosodification in Harmonic Serialism is built in harmonically improving steps and propose that prosodic constituents higher than the syllable create opaque domains for syllable-building operations. Those assumptions prevent core syllabification to operate with adjacent segments belonging to different morphs if one of the segments, but not the other, is contained in a prosodic constituent higher than the syllable at some intermediate level of representation. The case of opacity by overapplication of /s/ aspiration in Spanish due to word- and phrasal-level resyllabification finds a straightforward explanation in those terms. The relative transparency of the aspiration process found in different dialects of Spanish is derived by the relative position that the markedness constraint CodaCondition occupies with respect to two families of constraints enforcing prosodification: Parse-Segment » Parse-ProsodicWord, and two morphology-prosody alignment constraints, Align-Left (Stem, ProsodicWord) » Align-Left (MorphologicalWord, ProsodicWord).