Phonotactic Constraints and Word Demarcation in Romance

• Type: Poster in an International Conference
• Date: 2010

Authors

João Veloso (Author) FLUP; Pedro Tiago Martins (Author) FLUP

Conference International

CUNY Conference on the Word in Phonology

New York, EUA, 14 a 15 de Janeiro de 2010

Scientific classification

FOS: Humanities > Other humanities

CORDIS: Humanities > language sciences > Linguistics

Other information

Abstract (EN): In many languages, some phonological segments or structures are allowed at word boundaries only. The importance of this fact is manifold: it shows that phonology is not “blind” to the word as a linguistic unit; it can explain some aspects of speech processing (how speech continua are split into words); it may help to build software aimed at identifying word boundaries within larger continua. For European Portuguese and for other Romance languages possibly, it is proposed that a “Prosodic Tolerance of the Word Right Boundary” should play an important role as a phonotactic cue for word-endings: these languages are known to be very restrictive as far as the segmental codafilling is concerned. However, these restrictions are somehow cancelled at word-endings, which admit phonotactic combinations that are not allowed elsewhere. A formalization of this phenomenon, inspired by the logical formalisms of Declarative Phonology, is also proposed here.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific