General Meeting - Kate Mooney / Epenthetic inheritance, or: How I learned to stop inserting and love phonology
General Meeting - Kate Mooney / Epenthetic inheritance, or: How I learned to stop inserting and love phonology
Friday April 10 at our General Meeting, Kate Mooney presents her work on the quality and phonological status of epenthetic consonants, abstracted below.
In this talk, I challenge the hypothesis that epenthetic consonants are true inserted segments, unrelated to surrounding material. Instead, I propose Epenthetic Inheritance: a theory in which epenthetic consonants are mutations of existing material. Closely following work in traditional phonetics and Articulatory Phonology, I argue that when epenthesis is most general (exceptionless & productive), it is best analyzed as a strengthening of existing articulatory movements. This allows us to explain why epenthetic consonants tend to minimally perturb existing articulatory dynamics, and also why they are often immune to phonotactic restrictions placed on segments. Lastly, it supports a strong cut between morphophonological and phonological operations: Phonology can only use the gestural material it already has, whereas morphophonology alone can truly insert and remove segments.