Resumen de How Neapolitan produces double consonants from Spanish singletons

Juan Antonio Thomas

• Twenty-eight Spanish verbal etyma are adapted into Neapolitan with a prothetic a- followed by double consonants, which are not present in the original etyma. Optimality Theory explains the conflict between the three restraints, Max, which disfavors the deletion of an underlying mora, the obligatory contour principle, which disfavors double consonants, and Coda, which disfavors coda consonants. Max dominates and accommodates the surfacing of an underlying mora by lengthening the consonant following the initial a-. While this is a word- formation process, the theory is based on a Neapolitan syntactic process, phono-syntactic reduplication.