Location: Keizerszaal, Meertens Instituut
Date/Time: Tuesday September 9, 2003; 15:00
New solutions will be offered to old problems of French phonology related to liaison and concomitant allophonic changes of segments involved in the affected syllables. On the base of results of experiments on production and perception, it will be proposed that liaison in prenominal adjectives or possessives plus noun is to be primarily explained by the syllable structure of the morphological material involved, and by morphological and phonological markedness of the feminine. No prespecification of allomorphs wrt gender is necessary. The gradient allophony observed in the preconsonantal and prevocalic feminines and masculines is the consequence of surface constraints guiding the segmental alternations and the syllable structure. An important difference between the present proposal and previous OT analyses is that the gradient results are accounted for.