The phonologization of redundancy:Length and quality in Welsh vowels

‘Phonologization’ is a process whereby a phonetic phenomenon enters the phonological grammar and becomes conceptualized as the result of categorical manipulation of phonological symbols. I analyse the phonologization of a predictable phonological pattern in Welsh, with particular attention to identifying criteria for whether phonologization has occurred. I argue for a model where phonologization experiences bottom-up and top-down biases. From the bottom up, there is pressure to phonologize phenomena with a categorical distribution; from the top down, there exist formal constraints on featural specification. I focus on the requirement for featural specifications to obey the Contrastivist Hypothesis, which denies that redundant features can be involved in phonological computation, in the context of a framework with emergent features. I suggest that the Contrastivist Hypothesis acts as a useful check for emergent-feature theories, whilst independent phonologization criteria provide contrastivist approaches with a more solid conceptual underpinning

Welsh svarabhakti as stem allomorphy

In this paper I propose an analysis of the repairs of sonority sequencing violations in South Welsh in terms of a non-phonological process of stem allomorphy. As documented by Hannahs (2009), modern Welsh uses a variety of strategies to avoid word-final rising-sonority consonant clusters, depending in part on the number of syllables in the word. In particular, while some lexical items epenthesise a copy of the rightmost underlying vowel in the word, others delete one of the consonants in a cluster. In this paper, I argue that at least the deletion is not a live phonological process, and suggest viewing it as an instance of stem allomorphy in a stratal OT framework (Bermúdez-Otero 2013). This accounts for the lexical specificity of the pattern,which has been understated in the literature, and for the fact that cyclic misapplication of deletion and diachronic change are constrained by part-of-speech boundaries