Syllable contact effects as a diachronic precursor to mora licensing in early French /sC/ clusters

Abstract

This paper proposes that Old French coda /s/ deletion (11th-13th centuries) forms part of a broader diachronic progression of ever-stricter requirements on the sonority contour of /sC/ clusters in syllable contact, reframing part of a well-known moraic analysis (Gess 1998a, 1999, and later work) of Old French coda loss phenomena. Given the multistage rollout of coda /s/ deletion as a function of the sonority of the following onset, an approach hinging on syllable contact constraints not only offers a more detailed and precise formalization of the diachrony of word-medial /sC/ in Old French, but also draws systemic connections with cognate processes affecting /sC/ clusters in early French such as prothesis and earlier Proto-French stop epenthesis. The Optimality-Theoretic analysis presented here formalizes these phenomenological links and the constraints on syllable-contact sonority using the Split Margin Approach to the Syllable (Baertsch 2002, Baertsch & Davis 2003). Rather than sonority-graded mora-licensing constraints causing Old French coda /s/ deletion, the present account argues that their ranking above Faith is instead the acquisitional outcome of the near-total absence of coda /s/ across the lexicon, as a culminative result of the progressive tightening of syllable contact requirements.

Keywords

• Old French
• consonant clusters
• syllable contact
• historical phonology
• sibilant
• compensatory lengthening