Abstract
<p>Valencian hypocoristics constitute a domain in which morphology seems to be at rescue when phonological problems arise. The prosodic requirements of the truncated form (a disyllabic left-headed foot) determine the insertion of an inflectional exponent, i.e., 'morphological epenthesis'. The grammar avoids the insertion of regular epenthetic material and favors the choice of an exponent already listed in the lexicon. Assuming inflectional allomorphs to be underdetermined in the input, a constraint Priority ('respect lexical priority -ordering- of allomorphs', Mascaró 2007) is responsible for the assignment of exponents. In cases of phonological conflict, the interaction with markedness constraints forces the insertion of a marked allomorph in the hierarchy. In short, the proposal implies that phonology can control allomorph selection. </p>
Highlights
IntroductionVowel epenthesis is a crosslinguistically widespread strategy to satisfy language particular structural requirements (Hall 2011)
Vowel epenthesis is a crosslinguistically widespread strategy to satisfy language particular structural requirements (Hall 2011). An example of this can be found in Peninsular Spanish: (1) /stop/ > [estop] A tautosyllabic sequence of two obstruents is forbidden, so vowel epenthesis applies in order to split the cluster into two syllables
The syllabification of the clitic determines the insertion of an epenthetic schwa in (7b), whereas in (7c), the illegal coda cluster is avoided via the insertion of the marked masculine allomorph -u
Summary
Vowel epenthesis is a crosslinguistically widespread strategy to satisfy language particular structural requirements (Hall 2011). An example of this can be found in Peninsular Spanish:. Assuming the underlying representation of the Italian masculine definite article to be /l/ (Artes 2013), the masculine exponent -o is inserted when needed for syllabification. The insertion of an epenthetic vowel (i in Italian) would occupy a morphological position (/l-MASC.SG./), the gender space, so the use of a morphologically meaningful vowel is preferred. One of the goals of this paper is to elucidate the mechanisms that determine gender exponence.
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