Acceso usuarios
Samuel Douglass
, Travis G. Bradley
This article gives an Optimality Theory analysis of the resolution of vowel hiatus across word boundaries based on published descriptions of late 19th and early 20th century Moroccan Judeo-Spanish, also known as haketía. Our analysis builds upon recent accounts of hiatus resolution in contemporary non-Sephardic Spanish varieties. We argue that, instead of a markedness constraint requiring syllables to have onsets (Onset), the avoidance of vowel sequences (*Hiatus) is the driver of hiatus resolution strategies, which include (i) diphthongization of non-identical vowels via gliding of the higher vowel, (ii) coalescence of identical vowels, and (iii) deletion and coalescence of mid vowels. We formalize a novel account of mid vowel alternations. Correspondence constraints against vowel deletion refer to the markedness of vowel features and to the structure of the morpheme-initial syllable rhyme containing the target vowel. A markedness constraint penalizes adjacent round vocoids within a syllable. Our analysis explains why hiatus resolution fails to apply when the second vowel bears nuclear phrasal stress, a pattern also observed elsewhere in present-day Ibero-Romance. We extend the analysis to cover stylistic and typological variation in Northern-Central Peninsular Spanish and Chicano Spanish, while avoiding several complications of previous theoretical accounts.
