title: Clisis and hypocoristic formation in romance: a Stratal Optimality-theoretic approach
Creators: name: King, Matthew
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Stratal Optimality Theory
subject: Hypocoristic Formation
subject: Clisis
subject: Morphophonological Interface
subject: Serial Derivation

description: Clisis and Hypocoristic Formation (HF) have received much attention in parallelist Optimality Theory (OT) over past decades. However, these approaches are explanatorily, and sometimes descriptively, inadequate due to conceptual and architectural difficulties. In this thesis, I present three case studies that demonstrate this: the formation of hypocoristics in Chilean Spanish, syllabification and segmental processes in clisis in Barcelonan Catalan, and an analysis of the formation of prosodic asymmetries in enclisis in Italo-Romance. I take as my framework a stratal architecture restricted to three levels: the stem, the word and the phrase, each of which is co-extensive with the morphosyntax. This framework therefore aims to cover the totality of phonological computation. I argue that an OT approach to phenomena at the morphophonological interface in Romance must be serial, and it must adhere to strict modularity in order to achieve full empirical coverage while being maximally constrained. In HF in Chilean Spanish, there are hypocoristic forms that anchor to the leftmost segment of the full name, and those that anchor to the tonic syllable. While parallelist approaches must invoke co-phonologies to adequately describe the phenomenon, a Stratal OT analysis succeeds on the basis of core architectural premises. I argue that segment anchoring occurs at an earlier stratum than prosody anchoring, which necessarily takes place subsequent to stress assignment. I further elaborate an interpretation of the interface that allows exceptional morphological information to be understood by the phonology as indexed constraints. In clisis in Barcelonan Catalan, I approach the longstanding problem of accounting for the highly-complex data in a single analysis. I show again that parallelist approaches are insufficient, as they cannot formally distinguish between lexical and post-lexical phonological processes. Departing from established conventions, I argue for understanding the Barcelonan dual-consonantal clitics (CC), whence come the bulk of the exceptional syllabifications, as containing a preceding underlying schwa (VCC). These surface transparently in the word-level phonology, but are opaque at the phrase level, where a stratumspecific intolerance for complex codas causes the schwa to be deleted. Finally, in enclisis in Italo-Romance, I argue that varying prosodic patterns seen in enclisis in Neapolitan and Lucanian can be understood as a function of solely phonological factors. These patterns vary according to the syllable count of the base, and the number of objects present in enclisis. Past approaches have resorted to varying morphological statuses of clitic pronouns, or alignment of morpho-syntactic and prosodic units. By contrast, a derivational framework that distinguishes between lexical and post-lexical phonology, such as Stratal OT, achieves a complete explanation of the data without the need of further machinery. These case studies lead to the conclusion that a stratal model of phonology provides specific advantages over parallelist alternatives. The (re-)introduction of serial derivation and a formal distinction between lexical and phrasal phonology allows my analyses to achieve explanatory adequacy in each of the case studies in a way that is unparalleled by other constraint-based frameworks.