Syllable Onsets in Germanic: Three Case Studies

Abstract

Green (2003) proposes that the composition of syllable onsets is regulated by a “universally and intrinsically ranked set of Onset-Well-Formedness (OWF) constraints,” according to which syllable onsets with steep-rising sonority (e.g, stop – glide onsets) are preferred to syllable onsets with shallow-rising sonority (e.g, stop – fricative onsets), which are in turn preferred to syllable onsets with falling sonority (e.g, fricative – stop onsets). In Green’s view, “[e]xactly which onsets a particular language tolerates will be determined by the ranking of the OWF constraints with respect to faithfulness constraints, or to a constraint against syllable codas, or to a constraint against rising sonority across a syllable boundary” (Green 2003: 239). In this paper, I investigate the status of Green’s OWF constraints in three Germanic languages: Gothic, Faroese, and German. Before doing so, the limits of this work must be established. First, Green’s paper is couched within Optimality Theory (OT), but the formalism in this paper is extremely limited. Secondly, the discussion here is restricted to word-internal syllable onsets, as word-initial onsets have a somewhat different status in all of the languages discussed here. It is clear that most languages permit a wider range of onsets word-initially than word-internally. For instance, in English, as Hammond (1999) points out, [pw] and [bw] onsets are only permitted word-initially, and then only in loan words like pueblo and bwana, and this type of phenomenon is by no means rare. Such onsets can generally be handled by means of various FAITHFULNESS constraints, i.e, constraints regulating the relationship between the input and the output. The constraints I have in mind here ban deleting, inserting, and reordering segments, and must outrank any constraints banning various types of onsets. Since deleting a segment, inserting a segment, and reordering segments are blocked, these onsets must be maintained. Word-internally, of course, there is another way to eliminate dispreferred syllable onsets, namely by moving segments into the coda of the preceding syllable. Hence, in my view, word-internal onsets lend more insight into the phonology of a language, and I therefore focus on them here, although I return briefly to word-initial onsets at the end of the paper.