12h00
Long Distance Geminates - myth or fact?
Noam Faust (université Paris 8, CNRS SFL)
Long Distance Geminates - consonants associated to two positions across a realized vowel - have first been proposed by McCarthy 1981 for the satisfaction of tripositional templates by biradical roots. Hoberman 1989 pointed to several sets of facts from Semitic languages that illustrate the avoidance of such configurations, relating them to Geminate inseparability. Most intriguingly, Syriac exhibits [jippok] where one expects *[jipkok]. Odden 1994, Gafos 1998 and Rose 2000 then contested the existence of LDGs altogether, reducing them to simple CvC sequences where C=C, which they show are marked cross-linguistically. Still, none of the deniers of LDGs has tackled the Syriac effect, or explained why it is only attested in those languages that are claimed to have LDGs.
In this talk, and in light of a paper I am working on, I wish to contribute to the debate in two ways:
- Show novel data sets from Semitic that can be explained by avoidance of LDG/ CvC, specifically Mehri, Modern Hebrew, Modern Arabic and Maaloula Neo-Aramaic.
- Discuss whether these sets really justify a distinction between LDG and CvC.
Gafos, Diamandis [Adamantios]. 1998. Eliminating long-distance consonantal spreading. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 16:223–278.
Hoberman, R. D. 1988, Local and long-distance spreading in Semitic Morphology. NLLT 6: 541-549.
McCarthy, J. J. 1981. A prosodic Theory of Nonconcatenative Morphology. LI 12,3: 373‒418.
Odden, David. 1994. Adjacency parameters in phonology. Language 70:289–330.
Rose, Sharon. 2000. Rethinking geminates, long-distance geminates and the OCP. Linguistic Inquiry 31:85-122.
