French liaison and hiatus avoidance
Benjamin Storme
August 2024 

One key hypothesis of Optimality Theory is that phonological processes are motivated by phonotactic constraints. This hypothesis has been challenged by Morin (2005) using data from French liaison that are problematic for the analysis of this phenomenon as motivated by an anti-hiatus phonotactic constraint. Morin proposed instead a usage-based account à la Bybee (1999) that does away with phonotactic constraints all together. This paper uses evidence from lexical statistics to show that hiatus avoidance does play a role in liaison alternations. The paper further shows that phonotactics is not the only motivation for liaison alternations and argues that morphophonological constraints are also at play.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008045 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Radical: A journal of phonology, 6, 1-30(https://radical.cnrs.fr/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Storme_2024.pdf)
keywords:	french liaison, optimality theory, usage-based phonology, phonotactics, hiatus avoidance, morpheme realization, paradigm uniformity, morphology, phonology
previous versions:	v3 [April 2024] v2 [April 2024] v1 [April 2024]
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