Underapplication of vowel reduction to schwa in Majorcan Catalan productive derivation and verbal inflection

Abstract

In Majorcan Catalan, the process of vowel reduction of the mid front vowels to schwa in unstressed position underapplies under certain circumstances: (a) in productive derived forms with an unstressed vowel located in the initial syllable of the stem which alternates with a stressed mid front vowel in the stem of the underived form (p[é]ix ‘fish’ ˜ p[e]ixet ‘fish dim.’); (b) in verbal forms with an unstressed vowel located in the initial syllable of the stem which alternates with a stressed close mid front vowel in another verbal form of the same inflectional paradigm (p[é]ga ‘(s/he) hits’ ˜ p[e]gam ‘(we) hit’); (c) in learned and loan words with an unstressed e located in the initial syllable of the stem (p[e]culiar ‘peculiar’). In this paper I propose a novel explanation of these patterns framed within a relativized version of the Transderivational Correspondence Theory (TCT) (Benua 1997/2000), the Optimal Paradigms model (OP) (McCarthy 2005), the Positional Faithfulness Theory (Beckman 1998/1999) and the prominence driven approach to vowel reduction (Crosswhite 1999/2001, 2004).