Palatalization and glide strengthening as competing repair strategies: Evidence from Kirundi
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alternations involving place-changing palatalization (e.g. t+j → ʧ in spirit – spiritual) are very common and have been a focus of much generative phonological work since Chomsky & Halle’s (1968) ‘Sound Pattern of English’. The interest in palatalization and its mechanisms (see e.g. Sagey 1990; Chen 1996; Bateman 2007) has somewhat obscured the question of how these processes fit into a wider typology of segmental alternations. What happens when palatalization fails to apply? Do other processes take its place and apply under the same circumstances? In this paper, I argue for a close functional and formal affinity between place-changing palatalization and one such process, palatal glide strengthening (e.g. p+j → pc). As evidence I present data from Kirundi (Bantu) on the realization of consonant + palatal and velar glide sequences within and across morphemes. As will be shown, palatalization and glide strengthening in Kirundi work in parallel, affecting different subsets of consonants. Specifically, palatalization targets C+j sequences with laryngeals, velars, nasal coronals, and – across morpheme boundaries – non-nasal coronals. In contrast, glide strengthening targets C+j sequences with labials and – within morphemes – non-nasal coronals. In addition, glide strengthening applies to within- and across-morpheme consonant + velar glide sequences, producing a set of outputs (e.g. m+w → mŋ) similar to C+j sequences. I further present a unified Optimality Theoretic (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004) account of these seemingly disparate phenomena as both arising from different rankings of constraints prohibiting consonant + glide sequences (parameterized by place and/or manner) and various feature-specific agreement and faithfulness constraints. Finally, I explore typological predictions of this account, reviewing several remarkably similar cases of C + glide resolution patterns from other languages, and outlining questions for further research on consonant-vowel/glide interactions.This article is part of the special collection: Palatalization
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it