Coronals and compounding in Irish

Abstract

Irish is characterized by a process of lenition, by which (among other changes) the coronals t, d, s become h, ɣ, h under certain morphosyntactically determined circumstances. Lenition of coronals is blocked (i.e. t, d, s remain unchanged) after other coronal consonants in certain domains, a phenomenon known as coronal fusion (CF). In a subset of CF domains s changes to t rather than remaining s, a phenomenon known as s-fortition. In this paper, it will be shown that the domain of CF and s-fortition is the (recursive) prosodic word, as these two processes are found in right-headed as well as left-headed compounds, but not in other (noncompound) left-headed complex NPs. An optimality-theoretic analysis reveals that CF and s-fortition are motivated by the same constraint ranking: the phonological requirement that coronal consonants be followed by other coronal consonants is more important than the selection of the morphologically correct mutation grade of a word.1.

Prosodic structure between the prosodic word and the phonological phrase: Recursive nodes or an independent domain?

“…We should at least point out that the AP is characterized in Jun (2005b) as 'a small unit above the Word', usually formed of a single PW -according to Jun (2005b), Korean APs contain on average 1.2 content words, and 3-4 syllables. Additionally, S. (Hualde, Elordieta and Elordieta 1994), Bengali (Hayes and Lahiri 1991), German (e.g., Wiese 1996), Icelandic (Árnason 1999), Irish (Green 2008), Shanghai Chinese (Selkirk and Shen 1991;Duanmu 1991), Swedish (e.g., Bruce and Hermans 1999; see also 5.3 below), and Turkish (Kabak and Vogel 2001; see also 5.3 below), among others. 22 For space limitations, we cannot survey all the facts here.…”

Review of Nolan (2012): The structure of Modern Irish: A functional account

“…In his first discussion of this word (p. 62) he presents it modifying the verb 'to kill/murder' dúnmaraigh and follows this with a discussion of how "[t]hough now opaque, it is possible that historically these may have represented compounds, though [he is] not aware of any supporting evidence to elaborate on this possibility. " As discussed in Green (2008) and Windsor (2011a;2012a), the appearance of lenition on the second member (and stress differences) enable a researcher to test whether or not a form is a compound in Irish. Once again, this places a large importance on the <h> which would follow the initial <m> of maraigh 'to kill/murder;' an <h> which shows up in the next iteration of the compound form in Nolan's examples (60) and (61) (p. 64): dhúnmharaigh 'murdered' and dhúnmharú 'murder-VN' respectively.…”