| Abstract: | This paper studies the processes that affect coda consonants in a variety of Dominican Spanish where all consonant classes are avoided syllable finally. Although consonants that are assigned to the syllable coda may be preserved through segments such as [i], [h], [N], and nasals that are homorganic with a following stop/affricate, it is demonstrated that in this Spanish dialect all syllables are free of codas. This follows from two main findings. The segments [h] and [N] are not consonants but glides, which are parsed as the offglide of the falling diphthongs [Vh], and [VN], respectively. Furthermore, those nasals that are homorganic with a following stop/affricate are not the first member of an NC cluster, but the nasal component of a prenasalized stop/affricate, which is parsed by the syllable onset. Central to this analysis is a family of alignment constraints that regulates the distribution of consonants within the syllable (Itô and Mester 1994, 1999, Piñeros 2001), as well as a family of correspondence constraints that regulate the identiy between input and output forms (McCarthy and Prince 1995). Coda effects are shown to follow from the interaction of these two constraint families under the supervision of markedness constraints, which are capable of blocking the application of phonological processes when their outcome is a highly marked structure. |
