Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T02:39:42.220Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Phantom consonants in Basaa*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2008

Deborah Schmidt
Affiliation:
University of Georgia

Extract

Basaa, a zone A Bantu language spoken in Cameroon, is only one among many genetically unrelated languages for which the positing of phonetically null phantom consonants facilitates a phonological account of certain otherwise unexpected surface forms encountered in derivational paradigms. Clements & Keyser (1983), Marlett & Stemberger (1983), Keyser & Kiparsky (1984), Crowhurst (1988) and Hualde (1992) propose that phantom consonants exist in Turkish, Seri, French, Finnish, Southern Paiute and Aranese Gascon, for example, syllabifying as onsets or codas where appropriate and in certain cases inducing the gemination of an adjacent consonantal segment or the lengthening of a preceding tautosyllabic vowel, as we shall see takes place in Basaa.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Archangeli, Diana (1988). Tiwi ghost consonants. Ms, University of Arizona.Google Scholar
Archangeli, Diana (1991). Syllabification and prosodic templates in Yawelmani. NLLT 9. 231283.Google Scholar
Clements, George N. (1985). The geometry of phonological features. Phonology Yearbook 2. 225252.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clements, George N. & Keyser, Samuel Jay (1983). CV phonology: a generative theory of the syllable. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Crowhurst, Megan (1988). Empty consonants and direct prosody. WCCFL 7. 6779.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce (1987). A revised parametric metrical theory. NELS 17. 274289.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce (1989). Compensatory lengthening in moraic phonology. LI 20. 253306.Google Scholar
Hualde, Jose Ignacio (1992). Empty consonants and other CV-tier effects in Aranese Gascon. Lingua 86. 177188.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hyman, Larry (1988). Syllable structure constraints on tonal contours. Linguistique Africaine 1. 4960.Google Scholar
Keyser, Samuel Jay & Kiparsky, Paul (1984). Syllable structure in Finnish phonology. In Mark, Aronoff & Oehrle, Richard T. (eds.) Language sound structure. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 731.Google Scholar
Lemb, Pierre & De Gastines, François (1973). Dictionnaire Basaa-Français. Douala: College Libermann.Google Scholar
Lombardi, Linda & McCarthy, John (1991). Prosodic circumscription in Choctaw morphology. Phonology 8. 3772.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, John & Prince, Alan (1986). Prosodic morphology. Ms, University of Massachusetts, Amherst & Brandeis University.Google Scholar
Marlett, Stephen A. & Stemberger, Joseph Paul (1983). Empty consonants in Seri. LI 14. 617639.Google Scholar
Pulleyblank, Douglas (1988). Vocalic underspecification in Yoruba. LI 19. 233270.Google Scholar
Rice, Keren (1989). On eliminating resyllabification into onsets. WCCFL 8. 331346.Google Scholar
Sagey, Elizabeth (1986). The representation of features and relations in nonlinear phonology. PhD dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Schmidt, Deborah (1992). Compensatory lengthening in a segmental moraic theory of representation. Linguistics 30. 513534.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmidt, Deborah (1993). Vowel raising in Basaa. Paper presented at the 24th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, Ohio State University.Google Scholar
Steriade, Donca (1987). Locality conditions and feature geometry. NELS 17. 595617.Google Scholar
Tranel, Bernard (1991). CVC light syllables, geminates and moraic phonology. Phonology 8. 291302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar