Syllable contact effects as a diachronic precursor to mora licensing in early French /sC/ clusters

• Francisco Antonio Montaño ^[1]
  1. [1] City University of New York

     City University of New York

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Isogloss: Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, ISSN-e 2385-4138, Vol. 10, Vol. 2, 2024 (Ejemplar dedicado a: RLLT21, Selected papers from LSRL 52, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper proposes that Old French coda /s/ deletion (11th-13th centuries) forms part of a broader diachronic progression of ever-stricter requirements on the sonority contour of /sC/ clusters in syllable contact, reframing part of a well-known moraic analysis (Gess 1998a, 1999, and later work) of Old French coda loss phenomena.  Given the multistage rollout of coda /s/ deletion as a function of the sonority of the following onset, an approach hinging on syllable contact constraints not only offers a more detailed and precise formalization of the diachrony of word-medial /sC/ in Old French, but also draws systemic connections with cognate processes affecting /sC/ clusters in early French such as prothesis and earlier Proto-French stop epenthesis.  The Optimality-Theoretic analysis presented here formalizes these phenomenological links and the constraints on syllable-contact sonority using the Split Margin Approach to the Syllable (Baertsch 2002, Baertsch & Davis 2003).  Rather than sonority-graded mora-licensing constraints causing Old French coda /s/ deletion, the present account argues that their ranking above Faith is instead the acquisitional outcome of the near-total absence of coda /s/ across the lexicon, as a culminative result of the progressive tightening of syllable contact requirements.