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).
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