A Gradient Harmonic Grammar Account of Nasals in Extended Phonological Words

Abstract

The article aims at contributing to the long-standing research on the prosodic organization of linguistic elements and the criteria used for identifying prosodic structures. Our focus is on final coronal nasals in function words in Greek and the variability in their patterns of realization before lexical words. Certain nasals coalesce before stops and delete before fricatives, whereas others do not. We propose that this split in the behavior of nasals does not pertain to item-specific prosody because the relevant strings are uniformly prosodified into an extended phonological word (Itô & Mester 2007, 2009). It rather stems from the contrastive activity level of nasals in underlying forms in the spirit of Smolensky & Goldrick’s (2016) Gradient Symbolic Representations; nasals with lower activity coalesce and delete in the respective phonological environments, whereas those with higher activity do not. We show that the proposed analysis captures certain gradient effects that alternative analyses cannot account for.