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Rhythmic syncope and opacity in Mojeño Trinitario
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2026
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This paper presents rhythmic syncope in Mojeño Trinitario, an Arawak language spoken in lowland Bolivia. In this language, every vowel that is in a weak prosodic position can syncopate. The syncope pattern of Mojeño Trinitario is remarkable for several reasons. First, it involves a regular, categorical and complete deletion rather than a statistical reduction of vowels. Second, it applies similarly to words with either of two stress patterns: iambic words, which make up the great majority of words, and trochaic ones, much less numerous. Third, a great variety of consonant sequences are the result of syncope, and syllabification applies again after syncope. Fourth, rhythmic syncope actually underapplies: almost half of the vowels that are in a position to syncopate are maintained, and vowel quality plays a statistical role in immunity to syncope. Fifth, due to a rich morphology and a set of complex phonotactic rules applying sequentially, syncope leads to extreme opacity. The data presented in tins paper in a theory-neutral way contribute to the typology of rhythmic syncope. It will also be of interest to phonologists considering constraint-based vs. derivational models of phonology.
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Published by the Linguistic Society of America with permission of the author under a CC BY 3.0 license.- Copyright
- Copyright © 2019 Françoise Rose.
Footnotes
*
I want to thank several people for their support and enlightening comments on the paper: Megan Crowhurst, Matthew Gordon, Denis Creissels, Larry Hyman, Gérard Philippson, Shelece Easterday, Spike Gildea, Lev Michael and Alexis Michaud. I also want to acknowledge the work of the editor and two anonymous reviewers that greatly helped improve the paper. I am also very grateful to Zoe Tribur, Paul Olejarczuk, Jennifer Krzonowski and Keli Yerian for their help. The first version of the paper was written during the academic year I spent at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Oregon, supported by a CNRS grant Soutien à la Mobilité Internationale.
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