Towards a non-arbitrary account of affricates and affrication

Abstract

This article presents a novel account of affricates/affrication and palatalisation (and their interrelationship) in Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Québec French, as well as English and Korean, within a further development of Government Phonology. Several properties of those two phenomena follow from independently established assumptions of the theory, in particular on the internal structure of obstruents, the nature of coronality, the representation of vowel height, and the asymmetric behaviour of the elements I and U. Stopness is argued to be encoded structurally, as a relationship between two positions, and that relationship is broken up by the palatalising effect of the element I, the result of which is affrication. The conditions under which this happens fall in line with well-known properties of the triggers.

Danish, Estonian, English: Variations on a theme

“…Instead, what we find is a relationship called control. This relationship is what is responsible for stopness in consonants (Pöchtrager 2006;2021c), and here it is extended to express laryngealisation in vowels, an equivalence established in Backley (2011: 122-124) (for the old stop element ʔ, though). The positions xn and x 1 , together with the relationship of control holding between the two, gives us a long (but not overlong) vowel with stød.…”

“…At the same time, we make predictions about 21 Take English peak (long vowel plus single consonant) or pink (short vowel plus two consonants). All three languages allow structures exceeding that limit, on the condition that at least one coronal (often s) is involved, with various additional restrictions giving rise to complex subpatterns (Pöchtrager 2010;2013;2021c). This leads to structures with a long vowel/diphthong plus a cluster of two consonants, or alternatively a short vowel plus three consonants, and in some extreme cases (German) to even longer sequences: English fiend, saint, text, German Mond 'moon' (long vowel), Herbst 'autumn' (short vowel), Danish falsk 'false', mulkt 'fine', takst 'rate' etc.…”

“…Fudge (1969), Halle & Vergnaud (1980), Selkirk (1982); for an analysis within GP 2.0 cf. Pöchtrager (2010;2013;2021c).…”

“…footnote 23. But those different heads are also involved in the expression of other properties, such as coronality (Pöchtrager 2021c) and at present it remains somewhat unclear whether they provide a satisfactory characterisation of those two classes.…”

Elements, Government, and Licensing

“…A seems to license more complex structures than otherwise possible, for example, Southern British English draft, with a long vowel (containing only A) followed by a coda-onset cluster (with coronal t also assumed to contain A), cf. Pöchtrager (2012;2021b) for discussion of such super-heavy structures. The presence of A might also be (part of) the reason why heavy diphthongs (7b) can government license a preceding branching onset, while the light diphthong in (7a) cannot.…”