Abstract

BATTISTI, Elisa  and  HERMANS, Ben. PALATALIZATION IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE AND CROSS-LINGUISTICALLY: STRUCTURAL MOTIVATION, SELECTION OF TRIGGERS AND TARGETS. Lingüística [online]. 2016, vol.32, n.1, pp.61-75. ISSN 2079-312X.  https://doi.org/10.5935/2079-312X.20160004.

This paper is about palatalization in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and cross-linguistically. It aims to show what the structural motivation of palatalization is, to explain why coronal stop consonants are the typical targets of palatalization, why they are the only targets of the process in BP, why /i/ is the typical trigger of palatalization and is the only trigger of the process in BP. With abstract elements C and V (van der Hulst 2005, 2011), we propose an internal structure of segments to show that the consonantality of high front vocoids is what motivates palatalization, a process that tends to affect consonants of similar structure to the trigger. We distinguish secondary and full palatalization (Bateman 2007) structurally and explain the selection of trigger and targets of palatalization in BP as the result of the most constrained kind of process, full palatalization with maximally identical trigger and targets

Keywords : palatalization; structural motivation; elements C and V; internal structure of targets and triggers.

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