Sonority plays an important role in the phonology of Latin consonants not only in the static organisation of segments into syllables but also in syllable contact phenomena and in a number of phonological processes, most notably in total assimilation at prefix-stem boundaries. This chapter gives a detailed description and analysis of these three sonority-related phenomena. The analysis of consonant clusters, syllabification and assimilations reveals the details of the functioning of the Sonority Sequencing Principle and the Syllable Contact Law in Latin. It further reveals the details of the interaction between these sonority-related generalisations and place of articulation; the nature of this interaction, in which the special nature of coronals is highlighted, is captured in three generalisations (the Place Condition, the Inverse Place Condition and the Generalised Place Condition). The analysis also provides insight into how sonority as a principle of phonological organisation interacts with morphological composition, specifically in the case of prefixation.

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The -alis/aris allomorphy has often been the object of detailed investigation, though the nature of its patterns and their interaction with phonotactics are not fully appreciated. A corpus-based analysis of the distribution of liquids reveals asymmetries between r and l and also important differences in repetition patterns. For l the constraint is that its occurrences must be separated by at least one non-coronal consonant; the productive diminutive formation is a saliently exceptional pattern. The case of the -alis/aris dissimilation falls under this constraint: liquid dissimilation is not only blocked by an intervening r but also by any non-coronal consonant. The distance between the two liquids is also relevant. The case of r is different. In final syllables only rVr, in non-final syllables only rVVr occurs. While this receives a partial diachronic explanation, the interesting and non-obvious fact is that Latin word forms generally conform to this pattern even where this is not warranted diachronically. We explain the exceptions to this generalisation with reference to two different morphophonological factors.

This paper offers a comprehensive analysis of the inflectional morphology of Latin in terms of the patterns of allomorphy and the environments governing the distribution of allomorphs. It is demonstrated that all the attested allomorphic alternations can be described as functions of a vocalic scale, practically the sonority scale of vowels plus the undifferentiated class of consonants as the least sonorous extreme. The distribution of allomorphs along the vocalic scale crucially displays the property of contiguity, i.e., the subsections of the scale that trigger one particular allomorph are uninterrupted.

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