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This article examines the extent to which complex segments are reanalayzable as two separate segments by examining /ʎ/ in two varieties of Occitan: Gascon and Languedocien. Varieties of Romance frequently realize /ʎ/ with an accompanying glide-like element (e.g. Colantoni, 2004). We therefore posit that this element may be reinterpretable as a separate segment and therefore be subject to processes which impact the phonological structure. The data for both varieties comes from the OcOr Corpus : a Corpus of Occitan Oral Narratives (Vergez-Couret and Carruthers, 2018) and we analyze our results using Strict CV. For word-final consonant clusters, we demonstrate that Gascon and Languedocien have different structural representations for word-final consonant clusters in that Gascon has a language specific parameter which allows the Final Empty Nucleus to licence the preceding consonant and support the consonant cluster, while Languedocien does not have such a parameter. Further, our phonetic study of /ʎ/ demonstrates that Languedocien’s rule of word-final depalatalization (e.g., Oliviéri and Sauzet, 2016) does not fully account for the data. Overall, we argue that Gascon treats /ʎ/ as a single representation, while /ʎ/ in Languedocien can be reanalyzed as two distinct segments, /ʎj/, which are then subject to language specific structural parameters.
