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Geminate Inalterability and Lenition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 February 2026
Abstract
It is a familiar observation that phonological processes frequently fail to apply to geminates. A number of previous proposals attempted to account for these geminate inalterability effects in terms of a distinction between singly and multiply linked autosegments. Subsequent research, however, has observed that geminate inalterability is inviolable only in the domain of lenition processes. In this article, an account of this generalization is couched within a general optimality theoretic treatment of lenition, in which a scalar effort minimization constraint interacts with a set of lenition-blocking constraints. The geminate inalterability generalization follows from this effort-based approach to lenition, coupled with certain assumptions concerning the effort involved in geminates and their lenited counterparts.
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