Stress and stem allomorphy in the Romance perfectum: emergence, typology, and motivations of a symbiotic relation

Perfective stem allomorphy and stress are morphological traits which interact in complex ways in Romance verbal inflection. This article surveys the whole range of variation of these traits across Romance varieties, typologizes the observed interactions between the two, and examines attested and unattested possibilities. A comparison between the modern-day and the original Latin systems suggests that there is a strong pan-Romance bias against having verbs with a concrete combination of properties: perfective root-stress and no perfective stem alternation. This is a combination of traits that would have frequently resulted in diagonal syncretisms between past and present given the phonological changes attested in the daughter languages. Homophony avoidance (and the adaptive-discriminative role of morphology more generally) are therefore argued to motivate the observed bias.

Homophony avoidance in the grammar: Russian nominal allomorphy

It has long been observed that languages tend to preserve contrast, either by introducing sound changes or by inhibiting them. However, it is not clear if any instances of so-called homophony avoidance reported to date constitute an active synchronic restriction in the grammar. This paper presents an instance of homophony avoidance in Russian masculine nouns. A perception experiment shows that the trends observed in the corpus are only partially extended to nonce words. I argue that the asymmetry observed in the experimental results can only be attributed to a synchronic restriction against homophonous forms in the same paradigm. Thus this paper presents strong evidence in favour of a synchronic anti-homophony constraint.

Categorical and gradient homophony avoidance: Evidence from Japanese

Many languages have been claimed to have phonological patterns that are sensitive to the need to avoid homophony – for example, a rule that is blocked if it would create a surface form that is identical to another word in the language. Such patterns always involve comparisons between words in the same morphological paradigm (e.g., singular and plural forms with the same stem). The lone exception to this generalization is

Defectiveness and homophony avoidance

The idea that certain morphological and phonological irregularities are due to speakers' desire to avoid homophony is widely invoked, yet has also come under strong criticism as an explanation which is neither necessary nor sufficient. In most cases there is no way to resolve the question, since the assumption that something is being avoided is itself a theoretical construct. In this article I attempt to address this last difficulty by looking at gaps in inflectional paradigms – where it is clear that something is being avoided – that plausibly correlate with potential homophony. These fall into two types: (i) lexical, where portions of the paradigms of two lexeme would be homophonous, and (ii) paradigmatic (i.e. syncretism), where forms within the paradigm of a single lexeme would be homophonous. Case studies of Tuvaluan, Russian, Mazatec, Tamashek and Icelandic confirm the effects of homophony avoidance as a genuine, if non-deterministic, principle.

Anti-Homophony Effects in Dakelh (Carrier) Valence Morphology

In Dakelh (Carrier), as in many other Athapaskan languages, valence prefixes and “inner subject” prefixes interact in a complex pattern involving a combination of consonant deletion and/or fusion and, in certain conditions, what looks like epenthesis. In this paper we investigate this apparent epenthesis effect, which is otherwise unexpected in this environment in Dakelh and is problematic in several aspects (Gessner 2003). We propose that the epenthesis should be understood as an anti-homophony effect (Crosswhite 1999, Blevins 2004a, b) serving to systematically maintain a surface distinction between paradigmatically related forms differing in valence. We demonstrate how the anti-homophony effect is best understood in a diachronic-evolutionary context rather than a synchronicphonological one: “epenthesis” is really the blocking of syncope (as a regular historical sound change). The account constitutes a striking parallel to the explanation of so-called antigemination effects as the result of syncope blocking through homophony avoidance, as proposed by Blevins (2004a, b).