PHONOTACTIC CONSTRAINTS AND WORD DEMARCATION IN ROMANCE 1

Abstract

The lack of phonetic and phonological cues to word demarcation is a classical issue in descriptive linguistics. Among other consequences, it motivated the early structuralists ’ proposal of the morpheme as the basic linguistic unit and a substitute for the word in linguistic description (for a review, see, a.o., Coates 1999: 10; Bauer 2004: 108). Departing from the linearist, naïve perspective that only units which could have silent pauses as natural boundaries could be fully accepted as linguistically relevant units (see, e.g., Pike 1943: 42), other early approaches accept that different phonetic/phonological facts might behave as cues to such boundary marking (Jones 1931; Anderson 1965). The occurrence or the inhibition of certain segments or phonotactic structures in word boundaries are amid the cues admitted by these studies. Regardless of what could be accepted as a “word ” in any given language, it is generally accepted that such units do play a role as far as several phonological phenomena or processes are concerned (at least in languages where inflection, derivation and compounding are regular, productive processes). Among these “wordsensitive