[Grammaires Créoles] Moles Paul (U. d'Etat d'Haiti & Paris-8) & Bridget Copley (CNRS UMR 7023) / Noam Faust (UMR 7023 & Paris-8)

"You may emerge, but on my terms!" said UG to the epenthetic vowel in Modern Hebrew (résumé ci-dessous)

Résumés

Moles Paul (U. d'Etat d'Haiti & Paris-8) & Bridget Copley (CNRS UMR 7023)
Two future particles in Haitian Creole (résumé pdf)

Noam Faust (UMR 7023 & Paris-8)

Modern Hebrew (MH) shares at least one property with creole languages, in that its phonology emerged out of the phonology of another language. Indeed, MH phonology is contained within that of Yiddish, the native language of the dominant group of founding speakers, the Ashkenazi Jews of eastern Europe. For this reason, it is especially interesting to examine aspects of MH phonology that do not replicate patterns in those languages. One such aspect is the quality of its epenthetic vowel, [e]. This quality is surprising because it is not found in Yiddish (which has [ə]) or Russian (which does not require an epenthetic vowel). I claim that [e] is motivated by the interaction between the universal principles that govern the choice of epenthetic vowels and the specific morphology of Modern Hebrew. Specifically, among the three lexical vowels that alternate with zero, /e/ is the one that does so in the most contexts. I will present the proposal in Faust & Smolensky (2017), according to which an alternating vowel is lexicalized with an activity level (=strength) that is inferior to that of a non-alternating vowel. Within gradient harmonic grammar (Smolensky & Goldrick 2016), syncopating an alternating vowel is thus less of a violation of Max than syncopating a non-alternating vowel like /i/. Given this manner of lexicalizing weakness, the choice of the quality /e/ for the epenthetic vowel follows from the OT notion of epenthesis as a violation of an output’s dependence on the input: /e/ is selected because it least violates Dep. To summarize, rather than being inherited from the phonology of some sub-stratum, the epenthetic vowel of Modern Hebrew emerged from within the language, according to universal principles.