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This paper provides a close examination of how Spanish speakers syllabify sequences of vocoids of rising sonority within the lexicon (e.g., piano 'piano' , persiana 'blind' or historia 'history'). A survey with 246 words administered to 15 Peninsular Spanish speakers has enabled us to examine in a quantitative way the strength of prosodic and morphological conditions on the appearance of the so-called exceptional hiatuses (Navarro Tomás 1948; Hualde 1999, 2005; Colina 1999). The data in our study reveals that the word initiality effect is not as strong as stated in the literature and that there are large differences between speakers: within the same dialect, half of the informants have the word-initiality effect in words such as piano 'piano' or diálogo 'dialogue' , while the rest have practically generalized the presence of a diphthong in this position. Interestingly, morpheme boundary effects are found in conservative speakers and their conditions differ depending on the paradigm: (a) in nominal forms, gliding is blocked when there is an intervening morpheme boundary and when the glide is a high back vowel (virt[u.Áo]so 'virtuous' vs. od[Ájo]so 'hateful' , act[u.Áa]l 'present' vs. cord[Ája]l 'cordial'); (b) in verbal paradigms, gliding is blocked when there is an intervening morpheme boundary and when the high vowel can be stressed in some form of the paradigm (conf[i.Áa]r 'to trust' , confío 'I trust' vs. camb[Ája]r 'to change' , cambio 'I change'). In general, the situation indicates that language change is in progress and that, for some speakers, the presence of lexical items that are pronounced with a hiatus is gradually disappearing. The article presents an analysis in terms of a correspondence-based OT analysis which captures the prosodic and analogical forces governing this process together with the interspeaker variation found in the data.

The goal of this paper is to analyse the partial or total deletion of the Person/Number exponents in imperative-enclitic contexts in Catalan and Spanish. Both languages lose phonological material in a specific context, but Spanish deletes the right-edge segment from the verb whereas Barcelona Catalan loses the left-edge segment of the clitic. Our aim is to account for the contrasting solutions shown by these two neighbouring languages using the same constraints but ranked differently in the Optimality Theory framework. OT allows us to put together different types of grammatical requirements, including distinctness requirements, particularly a positional OCP constraint on Person/Number features, and faithfulness conditions, specifically the condition related with morpheme realization, all of which interact with alignment and markedness constraints.