Maria-Rosa Lloret

More on Alignment as an Alternative to Domains: The Syllabification of Catalan Clitics

Abstract In Catalan vowel epenthesis and consonant deletion seem to have a different conditioning in simple words, in verb-clitic or clitic-verb sequences, and in clitic-clitic sequences (where an emergence of the unmarked effect with respect to syllable structure is found). In this paper, it is argued that, in spite of these domain effects, which would suggest the need for a serial analysis, all the facts concerning epenthesis and consonant deletion can be accounted for in a parallel optimality-theoretic approach. The differences in behavior are the consequence of the different ranking of morphological Alignment constraints with respect to other constraints and an Alignment constraint that makes reference to subsyllabic constituents.

The representation of glottals in Oromo

In current phonological feature theories, the behaviour of glottals poses serious problems for their representation. The special status of / h / and /? / which are often transparent to vowel harmony processes (cf. Steriade 1987; McCarthy 1991, forthcoming; Stemberger 1993), has led to the hypothesis that, at least in some languages, they lack a place node. The representation of ejectives and implosives, though, is very rarely discussed in the literature. On phonetic grounds, the main difference between plain stops and ejectives and implosives is the airstream mechanism used during their realisation, the former having a pulmonic egressive airstream while the latter involve a supplementary glottal constriction, which may accompany either egressive airflow, as in ejectives, or ingressive, as in implosives.

A Report on the Corpus Oral Dialectal del Català Actual (COD)

Since 1991 the Department of Catalan Philology has been preparing a set of linguistic corpora of contemporary Catalan. It is called Corpus de la Universität de Barcelona (CUB), or the University of Barcelona Corpus. The aim of the project is to gather representative data in order to contribute to the study of language variation from a geographical, social, and functional perspective.* The project is divided in two major areas of study: one is concerned with written data and the other with spoken data. The first one is called the Written Catalan Corpus (or CECA). It is based on information from newspapers. The second is called the Spoken Catalan Corpus (or COCA). It includes three groups dealing with functional, social, and geographical variation. Within the functional area of research (the COF), there are three subcorpora: the COM (or Media Corpus), which deals with data from radio and TV advertisements, the COC (or Speech Corpus), which studies textual phenomena and casual speech, and the COR (or Functional Varieties Corpus), which studies functional varieties and ethnographical aspects of speech acts. The two latter groups work together with the Social Varieties Corpus (the COS), and they form the group called CORCS (or Spoken Corpus of Functional Varieties, Speech, and Social Aspects). Finally, geographical variation is dealt with in the COD (or Dialectal Corpus), which provides data from the entire Catalan area. Figure 1 shows the general design of the University of Barcelona Corpus. The general project was designed in three stages: data collection, data systematisation, and analysis of the results. In addition to that, a final stage of matching and comparing the results of the different subcorpora has also been planned. The goal of this paper is to present a brief report on the Dialectal Corpus (COD). Concerning working procedures, and in line with the general project, the Dialectal Corpus involves three main steps: (i) collecting a spoken

Fricative–affricate alternations in Catalan

Abstract Catalan has a [ʒ] ~ [t͡ʃ] alternation that has traditionally been viewed as the consequence of final affrication of an underlying /ʒ/, a fortition operation, followed by general devoicing of obstruents. This interpretation has been held in classical generative rule-based approaches and also in autosegmental models, amounting either to a highly specific process or, when an attempt is made to generalize it, to wrong predictions; these shortcomings are also applicable to optimality-theoretic analyses. Following ideas in (Wheeler, Max W. 2005. The phonology of Catalan. Oxford: Oxford University Press), we propose that underlying affricates are subject to intervocalic lenition triggered by independently motivated general constraints. Sequences of a stop followed by a fricative can become affricates but cannot be affected by lenition. The interaction between affricates and gemination is also discussed.

Syllabically-driven stricture effects in Majorcan Catalan high vocoids

Abstract This paper analyzes the variation found in Majorcan Catalan regarding the realizations of /i/ and /u/ in contact with other vowels, which depend on the nature of the vocoids themselves, the syllabic position in which they occur, their surrounding segmental context, and the geographic origin of the speakers. Leaving aside faithful hiatic solutions, their realizations range from different degrees of strengthening to fusion and deletion, and further coexist with some instances of /v/-weakening. To account for these patterns, we provide a unified analysis within the split margin approach to syllable organization (Baertsch 1998, 2002), with phonetic grounding supporting the distinction between [+high] and [–high] for palatal glides (but not for their labial counterparts) and the approximant character of /v/ in intervocalic position. We also show that, in order to explain the whole variation, markedness constraints referring to the harmony of segments in intervocalic position (Kirchner 1998; Uffmann 2007), and their specific interaction with faithfulness constraints, are needed.