Deriving sonority from the structure, not the other way round: A Strict CV approach to consonant clusters

Résumé En

This paper aims to show that sonority-based generalizations on consonant phonotactics should directly follow from representations, not from stipulations on representations such as the commonly accepted licensing or government statements. The basic reason for this is that the second approach is both arbitrary and circular, as it entails a variable ranking of alleged well-formedness principles, if we want to explain, for example, why TR clusters may be either tautosyllabic or heterosyllabic depending on the language. I argue instead for a representational alternative assuming that (i) consonants and vowels are universally segregated, and (ii) involve two parallel CVCV sequences – one on the C-plane, the other on the V-plane – (iii) which may differ in length. It is shown how the major sonority categories, and thereby the phonotactic constraints based on these categories, naturally result from how the two CVCV sequences are synchronized if the one on the C-plane is longer than the one on the V-plane. It will also be seen how the proposed structures naturally account for several processes such as liquid metathesis and deletion, vowel epenthesis, plosive fricativization, etc., while providing a means for measuring the relative likelihood of some of them on the basis of representational markedness. 1. Introduction Consonant clusters pose an interesting challenge for phonological analysis and theory. This concerns the way languages diverge as to the amount of phonotactic constraints they are subject to, the empirical generalizations that can be drawn from cross-linguistic diversity, and how these generalizations are handled by theoretical models. In what follows, I will first show how two basic types of clusters may be distinguished (Section 2.1), and how both types have been accounted for by representational approaches (Section 2.2). 1 It will be seen that past work on the subject has moved along different lines which are all based on the notion of " licensing ". It will be argued that these accounts suffer from at least one major drawback for a representational theory, as they need to turn supposedly well-formedness principles into hierarchically ordered constraints. I will then defend (Section 3) and develop (Section 4) a radically new approach to consonant phonotactics. This proposal is based on the assumption that planar segregation between consonants and vowels is a universal feature of phonological representations, and that the consonant and vowel planes may have different lengths. The major phonotactic constraints, commonly seen as involving features like [consonantal], [sonorant] or [continuant], depend on how these planes are synchronized, " sonority " being something which results from the structure, not the other way round. This theory will be shown to provide a straightforward account of a dozen well documented facts, from several generalizations on the combinatorial properties of onsets and coda+onset sequences, to such processes as liquid metathesis and deletion, vowel epenthesis or compensatory lengthening.