This collection is the third to explore the phonology and morphology of Spanish or other Iberian languages edited by Fernando Martínez-Gil as senior co-editor. The previous volumes (Campos & Martínez-Gil Reference Campos and Martínez-Gil1991, Martínez-Gil & Morales-Front Reference Martínez-Gil and Morales-Front1997) contained a broad range of non-linear generative analyses, but this anthology, co-edited with Sonia Colina, is the first containing articles on a variety of Spanish phonological issues and theoretical stances written exclusively from an optimality-oriented perspective. The editors have brought together beginning and established scholars, some considered leading experts in OT phonological research on Spanish, all of whom set out to explore hotly debated and still unsettled phonological themes, ranging from s-aspiration, nasal assimilation and velarisation, and primary stress collocation to the interface of phonology with morphology, language change and acquisition.
The compilation starts off with a Table of Contents that divides and identifies the readings according to six areas of research, making it relatively easier to relate articles thematically to each other, though I caution that readers may be somewhat disappointed that the section titles appear nowhere in the book itself. In the Introduction, the editors provide helpful summaries, extracting them from the abstracts heading individual chapters. While the inclusion of abstracts and a list of key words help nicely in spiking the reader's interest, one wonders whether it was necessary to include both kinds of summaries. Nevertheless, the editors succeed in finding a common thread to hold them together, thus showing how one piece of work transitions smoothly into another. The book ends with useful subject and constraint indexes, which again facilitate cross-referencing and make this hardcover edition quite tractable.
Before continuing, I must say that it is a challenge to review in a few paragraphs twenty articles spread over 550 pages with discussions that will do them justice. Thus I will do this very briefly and sporadically. Let me start off by acknowledging that while (non-)classical generative researchers will appreciate a book treating Spanish phonological phenomena comprehensively within an OT framework, they may find it puzzling that some authors restate known facts informed by what they claim to be superior algorithms, e.g. output-to-output constraints, conjoined constraints or stratal models, when such devices and their empirical justifications are still open for discussion (Kager Reference Kager1999, McCarthy Reference McCarthy2002, Gouskova Reference Gouskova2004 and the bibliography therein). However, other articles do provide refreshingly new data or new ammunition to existing factual arsenals. Add to these three overview papers and we have a balanced anthology that is simultaneously an excellent source for reviewing past arguments and a resource that could be used for advanced graduate courses.
The series of articles begins with two papers covering the interaction of phonetics and phonology. Travis G. Bradley presents an original study on the presence of vocalic intrusion in stop+rhotic onsets of various Hispanic dialects. He theorises that this process responds to differences in the temporal co-ordination of two abutting consonants, such that the wider the aperture, the more the likelihood that a vowel will appear. Consonant types also seem to control intrusion. If two consonants involve homorganic gestures, then the temporal distance between them is reduced and no intrusion occurs. Bradley further suggests that gestures and segments exist in phonological representations, but that conflicting gestural alignment constraints, coupled with intersegmental timing, regulate outputs, while non-gestural constraints may refer to segments and aspects of prosodic structure.
Pilar Prieto analyses the relationship of a syntactic right-alignment constraint with phonological phrase constraints, which establish maximal and minimal requirements of two prosodic words on the parsing of utterances. She indicates that these prosodic constraints override syntactic constituents and are crucial in making phrasing decisions. She further addresses the effects of over-parsing phrases in rapid speech, which appear to violate binary prosodic constraints, and introduces a constraint that minimises the number of phonological phrases within an intonational phrase, thereby condoning outputs with more than two p-phrases.
Four papers consider the interplay between markedness and faithfulness at the segmental level. Eric Baković revisits the topic of Chicano's vowel hiatus at word boundaries. He argues that rejection of adjacent identical vowels comes about by satisfaction of the NoLong and Onset constraints, the latter of which is needed to account for non-identical input vowels. His analysis re-enacts much of an earlier publication (Baković Reference Baković2005). He focuses on sequences of identical vowels and of a mid vowel followed by a high vowel, which are then simplified to a single vowel. Although the former complies with NoLong, for the latter Baković suggests that [+high] is ignored in assigning identity, thus resulting in vocalic coalescence.
Maria-Rosa Lloret & Joan Mascaró revisit nasal depalatalisation, delabialisation and lateral depalatalisation in codas. Introducing new assimilatory and borrowing facts, they argue convincingly that the change of final /m ɲ/ to [n] and /ʎ/ to [l] is still operative. Their account, built on the definition of base as a free-standing output, counters previous serial and OT analyses. For them, these processes are instances of a general algorithm that neutralises nasal and palatal place features in coda position, which are therefore banned by a high-ranked *−Cor constraint. They maintain that nasal and lateral centralisations in derived environments obey a base-identity constraint that disallows them in onsets. Their analyses is therefore predicated on positional faithfulness and output-to-output constraints. The authors fail to note, however, that the ranking given in tableau (24) to derive the singular form will raise problems for Caribbean Spanish, for *−Cor would ban the correct output [anˈdeŋ].
Fernando Martínez-Gil reanalyses vowel-height harmony studies of Proto-Spanish and of two Asturian dialects. He investigates the gradual raising of a stressed vowel in a stem triggered by the [+high] feature of a word-final vowel. He argues for unifying upper and lower mid-vowel raising to high and upper mid vowels, demonstrating that analyses using the [high, low, ATR] features fail to capture the process. He answers with two interacting constraints that require a stressed vowel to agree with the height feature of a following vowel within a foot. A local conjunction contrasting [high] and [ATR] then causes scalar raising, so that unfaithfulness between input and output is limited to one feature. This is a thought-provoking paper, harnessed to unquestionable richness of data.
Carlos-Eduardo Piñeros investigates various processes involving syllable-final nasals in four Spanish dialects. He first examines their behaviour in conservative dialects where nasals assimilate to following consonants or remain [coronal] in word-final position. The interaction of the highly ranked (positional) faithfulness constraints Agree(Place) and HavePlace with low-ranked PlaceHierarchy markedness constraints triggers these processes. He also examines nasal realisations in radical Caribbean dialects and draws attention to a constraint that aligns the nasal place feature with the left edge of the syllable occupied by a nuclear vowel. He concludes that velarisation is a transitional gradual change leading to the incorporation of a nasal into the preceding vowel. He relies on previous work to assert that place assimilation and velarisation in Caribbean dialects are in complementary distribution, and that the latter is still incipient in Havana Spanish, although Guitart (Reference Guitart1976) argues against this position. This study dovetails nicely with Lloret & Mascaró's article on a similar topic.
Three papers examine the topic of syllable structure and stress. Sonia Colina's article provides an overview of syllable types with respect to onset and coda formation and their interaction with the Sonority Sequencing Principle contour, the mechanics of (re)syllabification along with its phonotactic restrictions on possible complex onsets and codas, and strategies for repairing ill-formed syllables. By examining cross-dialectal and intra-speaker variations, she concludes that OT offers a significant improvement over past analyses because it exploits general interactions of universal markedness and faithfulness constraints, thereby dispensing with language-specific rules or avoiding ad hoc conditions on rule application.
Teresa Cabré & Pilar Prieto offer a new quantitatively based examination of speakers' syllabification of diphthongs of rising sonority, in various positions in the word. Contrary to commonly held opinions, they find that not all speakers pronounce diphthongs with a hiatus word-initially. Morpheme-boundary effects, which are different in nominal and verbal paradigms, and proximity to the main word stress constrain hiatus formation. Gliding fails when nouns have an intervening morpheme boundary followed by a high back vowel or when verbs have a stressed high vowel in some form of the paradigm. The authors provide a classic analysis involving interacting prosodic prominence and faithfulness constraints to predict hiatus, and use constraint conjunction to explain the blocking effects of glide formation in monosyllabic words.
Iggy Roca's article is an OT adaptation of his 2005 study on stress in non-verbs. Appealing to both old and recently collected facts, he restates familiar arguments: stress is a stem-final trochee for (un)marked paradigms; glides don't exist; consonant-quantity computation is questionable; the lexicon consists of traditional native or marked assimilated words and foreign forms; stress falls within the last three syllables (or vowels, in some cases). Roca proposes right-alignment constraints that relate metrical materials to the stem and enforces Onset on abutting vowels to explain lexically marked facts.
Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero opens a series of four papers treating the relationship between phonology and morphology. He challenges the traditional assumption that in denominal derivations, suffixes attach to stems lacking vowels. He argues instead for a stem-final vowel-deletion process before vowel-initial suffixes, viewed from an Optimality Stratal perspective. He claims that diphthongisation of stressed vowels and nasal and lateral depalatalisation prove that suffixation, with their interacting (conjoined) constraints, apply either at the Stem or Word level. He extends his analysis to deverbal derivations and vigorously argues against the idea that /Vs/-endings are word markers. Interestingly, while Bermúdez-Otero argues that word-final consonants ‘never have palatal alternants’, Lloret & Mascaró present evidence contending that such derivations exist.
Eulàlia Bonet argues that current Spanish lacks vocalic epenthesis in word-final position or in plural formation. She reinterprets outputs as underlying allomorphs, whose reflexes surface as [a o] in gender-unmarked cases. In marked cases, either // or other vowels appear in lexically specified bases. Various ranked constraints apply, contextually selecting the appropriate allomorph. Bonet also shows that epenthesis only occurs in word-initial and internal positions. She defends a single-grammar hypothesis to explain odd plurals of the /fan+s/ type, and rejects subgrammar explanations for being overly powerful and complex.
Mario Saltarelli advances a hypothesis that characterises a sound–meaning relationship between the morphophonological paired alternants of a paradigm lexical constant. He develops a paradigmatic account of Number that relies on the parallel evaluation of singular and plural outputs rather than on the evaluation of single outputs. He argues that this approach, along with the interacting RealiseNumber constraint, provides a uniform account of regular and exceptional cases in plural formation.
Caroline R. Wiltshire discusses the phonology of /n/-velarisation, /s/-aspiration and /j/-fortition at prefix edges. She proposes to explain them by analysing prefixed words as containing an internal word boundary of the form [pre[fix]pw]pw. This structure's interaction with the constraint Weak]pw, which prefers weaker rather than fully specified segments at prosodic boundaries, produces segment-final weakened outputs. These processes may occur at word-final position, not necessarily in codas. For her, analyses only considering codas and ignoring this dichotomy either suffer from syllabic complexity and rule ordering or appeal to unnecessary output-to-output constraints.
D. Eric Holt's paper is the first of a set of four dealing with language variation and change. He surveys OT explanations of language change and highlights their findings, not only invoking the interaction of faithfulness and markedness constraints, but also highlighting the role that perceptual, cognitive, systemic and external influences play in all levels of linguistic structure. The overview ends with an OT-oriented bibliography on language change and variation in Spanish and Hispano-Romance.
Gary K. Baker considers the lenition of geminate stops, singleton voiceless and voiced stops in their evolution from Latin to Spanish. From OT and Dispersion Theory perspectives, he views lenition not only as occurring in weak environments but also as resulting from a change shift that weakened stops, and maintains that their contrastive cues were caused by closure duration and voicing distinctions. Baker assigns a preponderant role to faithfulness in Dispersion Theory, claiming that it motivates constraint rerankings as new generations acquire language and reanalyse lexical forms.
Manuel Díaz-Campos & Sonia Colina tackle the acquisition of sociological manifestations of intervocalic /d/ in Venezuelan Spanish. Using quantitative evidence, they argue for faithfulness effects of onset, stressed syllables and word-initial domains in predicting retention of /d/ variants, and assign probabilistic weights to constraint rankings to account for deletion or retention as these relate to socio-economic class, age and style. They also confirm previous findings that showed children's tendency to retain /d/ as they are exposed to a more formal style spoken at school.
Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach introduces a logical approach for analysing the impact of sonority scales on both syllable-structure changes and sonority distance of abutting consonants in their evolution from Latin to Vulgar Latin, rather than just to Spanish. He discusses constraints in terms of sets of theorems and corollaries that characterise possible onsets and codas. He argues that the latter show a tendency to become more harmonic sonorous margins. He concludes by noting that sonority-based constraints disallow segment-adjunction rules and minimise the need to appeal to complex structures using output-to-output and sympathy constraints.
The final three papers focus on the acquisition of first language phonology in children with normal and delayed speech. Conxita Lleó & Javier Arias offer an analysis of stress acquisition, centring on the earliest twenty one-word utterances of two monolingual Spanish children. The utterances were analysed for their values of amplitude, duration and pitch. Results show that children cannot attend to these fine-grained phonetic cues, but are capable of mastering constraint hierarchies for word and phrasal stress. Typically, children favour trochaic footing to the extent of generalising to iambic structures and assign a high ranking to the HeadRight constraint in the phonological phrase, thus mimicking adults' grammar.
Alfonso Morales-Front examines the development of syllable structures in five Spanish-speaking children from the CHILDES project, and analyses it in terms of the Constraint Demotion Algorithm and the Gradual Algorithm Constraint. The acquisition process is shown to be not abrupt but gradual. He points out that exposure to frequency of syllable structures influences their acquisition order. He concludes that the gradient model is better equipped to handle both categorical and gradual aspects of learning and individual variations of syllable types at a given stage.
Jessica A. Barlow looks at the normal and delayed acquisition of tauto- and heterosyllabic cluster productions of four Spanish-speaking monolingual children. She finds that each child produces different typological patterns of consonant selection and reduction, which are accounted for by segmental constraints, mostly based on sonority patterns, and conventional faithfulness constraints. Thus she claims that her proposed hierarchy is validated by the cross-linguistic occurrences of these consonantal asymmetries. Her analysis, however, errs in various respects, because it wrongly provides contrasting lexical nasal consonants for the broadly accepted non-homorganic /… nC …/ sequence or lacks a crucial constraint that could have predicted a correct output.
In sum, in spite of the inconsistencies observed above and the need for exercising more careful editing, including maintaining uniformity in spelling between American and British English and trimming some footnotes to reasonable lengths, this collection will be of interest to all those engaged in Romance linguistics, regardless of their theoretical persuasion. Researchers will certainly see how well OT fares in explaining recalcitrant facts and will find a reasonable degree of success. Many of the articles are quite provocative, especially those using debatable OT machineries, because, rather than closing the chapter on a given issue, they are bound to open new avenues of analytical engagement. The editors say (p. 2) that the book will be suitable ‘as core reading for advanced undergraduate and introductory graduate-level phonology courses’; I agree that this is true as far as gradate students are concerned, since I have already had good experiences testing one of the chapters with a second-semester graduate class. The claim for undergraduates will have to await further testing.
