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Moraic onsets in Arrernte*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2017

Nina Topintzi  and
Andrew Nevins
Nina Topintzi*
Affiliation:
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Andrew Nevins*
Affiliation:
University College London and Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
*
E-mail: topintzi@enl.auth.gr, a.nevins@ucl.ac.uk.
E-mail: topintzi@enl.auth.gr, a.nevins@ucl.ac.uk.
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Abstract

The Australian language Arrernte has been argued by Breen & Pensalfini (1999) and Evans & Levinson (2009) to present a case of VC syllabification with coda maximisation, rather than CV syllabification with onset maximisation. In this paper we demonstrate that greater insights into a number of phenomena are achieved when they are analysed with CV syllabification and onset consonants that are moraic, a possibility independently proposed for a wide range of languages by Topintzi (2010). We review a range of evidence from phonetic studies, acquisition and musicology that points towards CV syllabification in Arrernte, and analyse allomorphy, stress assignment, reduplication and the transpositional language game ‘Rabbit Talk’ in terms of reference to moraic structure. The results lend themselves to new directions in the analysis of Arrernte, and provide further evidence for moraic onsets in prosodic morphology.

Type
Articles
Information
Phonology , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , December 2017 , pp. 615 - 650
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

For very helpful suggestions and discussion, we thank Myf Turpin, David Wilkins, Rob Pensalfini, Marija Tabain, Toni Borowsky, Michael Becker, Leo Wetzels, Moira Yip and Bob Ladd, as well as the editors, associate editor and anonymous reviewers of Phonology.

The appendices mentioned in the paper are available as online supplementary materials at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0952675717000306.

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