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Prosodic and analogical effects in lexical glide formation in Catalan

Abstract This paper provides a broad empirical description and a close examination of how Catalan speakers sillabify sequences of vocoids of rising sonority within the lexicon (e.g., piano ‘piano’, clariana ‘clearing’ or àvia ‘grandmother’). A survey with 381 words administered to 60 speakers has enabled us to identify two distinct varieties of Central Catalan: a more innovative variety (which displays a stronger tendency to glide formation) and a more conservative variety. This situation, together with a certain degree of inter-speaker variation found in the data, reveals the existence of language change in progress. Both varieties display clear prosodic regularities: word-initial positional effects (that is, gliding tends to be blocked in word-initial position; cf. m[i′ɔ]l ‘mewl’, p[i′a]no ‘piano’, d[iə]dema ‘diadem’) and distance-to-stress effects (that is, gliding increases when the distance to the tonic syllable is greater; cf. d[iə]lecte ‘dialect’ vs. d[jə]lectologia ‘dialectology’). These prosodic effects are also strikingly similar to the ones found in Spanish (cf. Hualde 1999). The article shows that this gliding process can be accounted for in a very intuitive way in terms of a correspondence-based OT analysis which captures the prosodic and analogical forces governing this process together with the dialectal and inter-speaker variation found in the data. In OT terms, the difference between the innovative and the conservative varieties will be interpreted as the loss (or weakening) of a prosodic constraint in the innovative variety. Idiolectal variation will be interpreted as the set of analogical/correspondence relationships each speaker establishes with other words in the lexicon.