Non-contrastive epenthetic segments as surface prosodic structure

I analyse two cases where segment epenthesis must be phonological but involves segments that are otherwise non-phonemic in the relevant languages: Argyll Gaelic (see also the Teangeolaoícht na Gaeilge talk to this effect) and Zealand Danish. Such involvement of non-contrastive information in phonological rules might be problematic for contrastivist approaches to phonology. I argue that this problem can be resolve if the epenthesis is analysed as not involving segments, but instead features attaching directly to suprasegmental nodes.

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