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Epenthesis positioning and syllable contact in Chaha

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2002

Sharon Rose
Sharon Rose
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Abstract

If an epenthetic vowel is required for syllable structure reasons, its position in a string may be determined by ‘directionality’, with the construction of maximal syllables beginning from a word edge (Itô 1986, 1989, Farwaneh 1995). Arabic has served as the prime example of directionality, but other Semitic languages have also played a role, such as Harari (Kenstowicz & Kisseberth 1979, Itô 1986) and Tigrinya (Denais 1990, Berhane 1991). In these languages the sonority of heterosyllabic (coda–onset) consonant sequences neither conditions insertion nor affects the site of the epenthetic vowel. Epenthesis is triggered by constraints on maximal syllable size, and the position of the epenthetic vowel is determined by directionality. As a result, violations of SYLLABLE CONTACT abound. Syllable contact can be defined as the requirement that a coda be more sonorous than a following onset (Murray & Vennemann 1983, Vennemann 1988).

In this article, I provide new data from Chaha, an Ethiopian Semitic language of the Gurage family, which demonstrate an intriguing difference from Semitic languages such as Harari, Tigrinya and Arabic.

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonology , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , December 2000 , pp. 397 - 425
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I am very grateful to the Chaha consultants who patiently conjugated verbs and provided judgements on alternate forms. Special appreciation to Tadesse Sefer, who served as the main consultant, as well as Wolde Fujie and Degif Petros Banksira. I thank the anonymous reviewers and the associate editor for pertinent comments and sound advice on restructuring the paper, and Degif Petros Banksira for detailed comments on an earlier version. Previous analyses of these data were presented at SWOT at UCLA and the Western Gurage Workshop in Santa Barbara in 1997, and are also discussed in Rose (1997). Thanks to Berhanu Chamora, Bruce Hayes, the late Robert Hetzron, Junko Itô, David Perlmutter, Glyne Piggott, Jean-François Prunet and Donca Steriade for comments and suggestions. I am grateful to Stuart Davis for sharing his work on syllable contact with me.