Iosad, Pavel. 2017. Welsh svarabhakti as stem allomorphy. Transactions of the Philological Society 115(2), 141–175.
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Categories: Welsh Historical phonology Phonology-morphology interface
This paper develops the analysis in this presentation. I offer an analysis of Welsh epenthesis, whereby a copy of a preceding vowel is inserted to break up final clusters of rising sonority (pwdr ‘rotten’ is [pudur] rather than *[pudr]) and deletion in such clusters in polysyllables (perygl ‘danger’ is [perɪɡ] rather than *[perɪɡl]). It has previously been argued that both processes can be analysed in a single phonological grammar. I show that this is not tenable for South Welsh dialects, and propose an analysis in terms of part-of-speech-specific allomorphy, formalized as lexical storage of POS-characterized stems rather than roots.
I’m Pavel Iosad, and I’m a Professor in the department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh. ¶ You can always go to the start page to learn more.