Silent lateral actors

The role of unpronounced nuclei in morpho-phonological analyses

Dados Bibliográficos

ID20344277
AutoresEdoardo Cavirani (0000-0001-7184-8226, KU Leuven , Leuven , Belgium, autor correspondente)
Ano2022
Volume39
Fascículo4
Páginas615-653
Data de publicação2022-11-25
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoThe Linguistic Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0167-6318 • E-ISSN: 1613-3676
EditoraWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/tlr-2022-2099
OpenAlexW4308200626
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas2
Referências citadas35

In Government Phonology and its descendants, there is a direct relation between representational complexity and lateral strength, as only melodically filled nuclei can discharge government and licensing. This relation is only broken in special circumstances, e.g. when lateral actorship is granted by a systemic parameter. In this paper, I provide a normalisation of lateral actorship by showing that the latter's correlation with complexity also holds for some silent nuclei without introducing a dedicated parameter. The hypothesis is that representational complexity does not necessarily correspond to some phonetic event: a non-empty nucleus can be unpronounced, without this impinging on its lateral actorship. Turbidity Theory provides the formal tools for distinguishing between empty and unpronounced nuclei. This follows from splitting the association between melodic and prosodic units into two independent relations - projection and pronunciation. Empty nuclei lack melodic content, whereas unpronounced nuclei only lack the pronunciation relation. This approach is shown to account for disparate phenomena, such as glide mutation in Classic Arabic, inflectional markers spell-out in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and the apparently exceptional behaviour of muta cum liquida clusters in Hungarian and in the Italian dialect of Finale Emilia. This approach also allows for a refinement of our understanding of the so-called yers, as well as for constraining the use of floating melody

Art · Linguistics · Literature · Melody · Musical · Phonology · Pronunciation · Computer Science · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Philosophy · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation