The Ibero-Romance rhotics: Of fake geminates, weight and sonority

Joaquim  Brandão de Carvalho

doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.376

The Ibero-Romance rhotics

Of fake geminates, weight and sonority

Authors

Joaquim Brandão de Carvalho Paris 8

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Abstract

The two rhotic consonants of Ibero-Romance languages are characterised by their very specific distribution and by the prosodic weight of one of them. Data has hitherto suggested a geminate-to-single contrast for the pair of rhotics. It will be shown here that this view must be rejected in favour of another which sees these putative geminates as complex syllabic onsets. But this hypothesis only holds if it can be shown that sonorants and only sonorants are likely to have weight in onset position in these languages. The Alignment theory of sonority makes this possible since sonority and weight appear as particular cases of the behaviour of the nucleus in that framework.

Keywords

rhotics, trills, sonority, prosodic weight, Ibero-Romance phonology

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