Conditioned epenthesis in Romance

Abstract

The factors influencing the insertion of non-etymological material (epenthesis) may extend beyond phonetics and phonology to include morphological and morphosyntactic considerations. We analyse cases from a wide variety of Romance languages where more than one epenthetic segment may satisfy a phonological constraint. We show that the choice of segment may be influenced by morphology or morphosyntax. We also investigate the insertion of a meaningless syllable where there may be little or no phonological motivation for insertion, but morphology plays a role in its distribution. In all of the cases examined, the inserted material (segment or syllable) has no semantic value and so is not a morph. Many of these phenomena have been accounted for in terms of lexically listed allomorphs; however, such an approach misses generalizations about the form and presence of the epenthetic material. We conclude that the notion of epenthesis should be broadened to include morphological and morphosyntactic conditions.