Hiatus Conspiracy in Romance Languages: a new perspective

ABSTRACT In phonology, conspiracies are the single biggest argument in favor of constraint-based theories over rule-based theories (Vaux, 2011) and as such have received much attention over the past few years. As has been noted (Vaux, 2011, 2019), conspiracies cannot be considered “facts”, but just intuitions on the part of linguists over the various processes that constitute the phonologies of languages, however, the fact that they have been noticed by structuralists, generativists and non-linear generativists alike over time (Vaux, 2011, 2019), tells us that there might be some truth to those intuitions. Notably, every language holds biases against certain structures and favors others, be it a specific type of syllable structure, i.e. *CC# or *CCC in Yawelmani (Newman, (1944), Kisseberth, (1970), Archangeli, (1984)), hiatuses, *V#V, *VV (Kisseberth, (2011), Casali, (1996)), a specific type of sequence of segments, i.e. *NC˳(Pater, 1996) or adjacent stress (Kisseberth, 1970). In Linguistics, languages are said to “conspire” against these ill-judged configurations in order to avoid them; to achieve this goal, languages employ a set of different strategies and processes, most commonly epenthesis and deletion. This dissertation sets to investigate in detail the linguistic conspiracy concerning hiatus in different Romance languages and to provide a new rule-based framework to account for them, and is divided into two main parts: first, we will look at the general history of the term conspiracy in Linguistics, its relevance in advocating for Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1991) over rule-based accounts and review different accounts of the famous Yawelmani conspiracy. The second section will instead focus more closely on hiatus through the delineation of its history and origin and through a review of how certain IE languages – such as Ancient Greek, Latin, Chicano Spanish, Canadian French, Haitian French and Italian – deal with the issue. Nevertheless, proving the existence of conspiracies will not be the main goal of this work, as this endeavor could be attempted only by closely looking at the history of the languages in question by taking into consideration Kiparsky’s (1972) points, instead, our aim will simply be to provide a framework for conspiracy theories, which will be the focus of our final chapter.