The Ibero-Romance rhotics

Abstract

The two rhotic consonants of Ibero-Romance languages are characterised by their very specific distribution and by the prosodic weight of one of them. Data has hitherto suggested a geminate-to-single contrast for the pair of rhotics. It will be shown here that this view must be rejected in favour of another which sees these putative geminates as complex syllabic onsets. But this hypothesis only holds if it can be shown that sonorants and only sonorants are likely to have weight in onset position in these languages. The Alignment theory of sonority makes this possible since sonority and weight appear as particular cases of the behaviour of the nucleus in that framework.