Katalin Balogné Bérces Connected speech

phenomena in Strict CV
phonology*
0 Introduction

The fact that the left edge of (phonological) words is a strong position counts
as a phonological commonplace. This basically means that the beginning of the
word favours fortition processes and disfavours lenition both synchronically and
diachronically. Theories have usually attempted to account for this with reference
to the word boundary (#) or to foot-initial position. As an alternative, most
practitioners of Strict CV Phonology (started by Lowenstamm 1996), which, being
a subbranch of Government Phonology, describes fortition and lenition phenomena
as the result of the interaction of government and licensing relations (cf. Ségéral
& Scheer 1999/2001), assume that each word of a major category begins with
a melodically empty CV unit on the skeletal tier, marking the word boundary
(after Lowenstamm 1999). One of the functions of the boundary-marker in a word
starting with a single consonant followed by a vowel is to absorb the reductive
force of government emanating from the first vowel of the word, thus the empty
vowel in the boundary-marker will be prevented from being pronounced, and the
word-initial consonant will not be negatively affected, i.e., it will not lenite.
So far, the study of this boundary-marker has concentrated on the behaviour
of consonant-initial words, therefore this paper has two main aims. On the one
hand, it investigates whether or not vowel-initial words also possess a boundary-
marker; on the other hand, it looks into what happens to the boundary-marker
post-lexically, i.e., in connected speech.

1 Strict CV phonology and the empty cv unit

Strict CV Phonology or CVCV Phonology (henceforth CV phonology) is a rad-

ical subbranch of Government Phonology (GP; cf. Kaye et al. 1985, 1990; Kaye
1990; Charette 1991; Harris 1994, among others). It accepts certain basic tenets of
GP, including the claim that phonotactic and procedural facts are (largely) due to
asymmetrical relationships like government and licensing contracted by phonolo-
gical units. However, CV phonology (Lowenstamm 1996; Balogné 1997; Ségéral &
Scheer 1999/2001; Szigetvári 2000, etc.) represents pioneering work representation-
wise; it hypothesises that prosodic structure is universally composed of strictly
alternating CV units, and clusters of adjacent consonants or vowels arise when
a language licenses domain-internal empty skeletal positions via (proper) govern-

* I am grateful to Miklós Törkenczy for reading a previous version of this paper and helping
me with his suggestions.

T H E E V E N Y E A R B O O K 6 (2004) 1–10 ISSN 1218–8808 1

2 Katalin Balogné Bérces

ment (PG) (familiar from GP). Domain-finally, the empty nucleus is parametrically
licensed in languages which allow for consonant-final words (cf. Kaye 1990).
A further innovation introduced by Lowenstamm (1999) and under close scru-
tiny in the present paper is the empty CV unit posited to the left edge of each
major category, marking the beginning of the word and serving as the phonolo-
gical embodiment of traditional # (henceforth the boundary-marker). As argued
in Lowenstamm (1999) and Ségéral & Scheer (1999/2001), this boundary-marker
can be used to explain certain phonotactic and lenition facts characteristic of the
left edge. This is illustrated in (1): the Proper Government (PG) emanating
from non-empty V positions1 licenses/silences the empty vocalic position of the
boundary-marker of words starting with a single pronounced consonant (1a) or a
cluster which forms a closed domain (indicated by bracketing) (cf. Scheer 1996)
(1b), as opposed to words starting with consonants unable to enter into this spe-
cial relationship (1c), where the empty v straddled by the consonants consumes the
PG coming from the first pronounced V, becomes unable to govern, and thus the
boundary-marker is left unlicensed (the impossibility of contracting PG between
the two empty v’s is shown by the crossed arrow).

(1) a. French tapis [tapi] ‘rug’ b. French plateau [plato] ‘tray’

PG PG

c v C V C V c v C v C V C V
| | | | | | | | |
t a p i [p l] a t o
c. *#tka


c v C v C V
| | |
t k a

If government is generally considered as a destructive force silencing vowels and

causing the lenition of consonants (as suggested in the Coda Mirror and further
elaborated on in Dienes & Szigetvári 1999; Szigetvári 1999), the configurations
in (1), especially (1a), also account for the fact that the beginning of the word
systematically resists lenition: the v position of the boundary-marker distracts
this reductive force and the word-initial C escapes weakening.
According to the workings of the boundary-marker, two basic language types
are predicted. On the one hand, modern occidental Afro-Asiatic (Algerian, Tune-
sian, Moroccan Arabic, Berber), Slavic and Greek have been shown to allow for any
combination of consonants as well as lenition word-initially (see, e.g., Scheer 2001
for Slavic, and Seigneur-Froli 2004 for Greek). Such languages will henceforth be
referred to as “permissive” (Scheer 2001 uses the name “anything-goes” languages,
which is even more expressive). Other languages like French or English, however,

1 Lower-case c’s and v’s symbolise empty positions while capital letters indicate non-empty
positions, and the boundary-marker is given in bold.
 Connected speech phenomena in Strict CV phonology 3

display a strong preference for rising sonority clusters word-initially (abbreviated

by some to #TR), as illustrated in (1), and no lenition is expected at that location.
We can call these languages “strict” (Scheer’s “#TR-only” languages).
The proper way to distinguish these two language types is one of the main con-
cerns of the present paper. So far, two options have been pursued in the literature.
Lowenstamm (1999) represents the original stance claiming that the boundary-
marker is always licensed (i.e., it always requires PG) in “strict” languages like
French (that is why certain clusters such as the one in (1c) are prohibited word-
initially) whereas it is not always licensed in “permissive” languages like Biblical
Hebrew (depending on the cluster in question) (2). Accordingly, the initial cv is
licensed in (2a), but it is not in (2b).

(2) Biblical Hebrew (data from Lowenstamm 1999 : 159f)

a. [klaBim] ‘dogs’ b. [lxaDim] ‘captures (n)’
PG PG

c v C v C V C V C v c v C v C V C V C v
| | | | | | | | | | | |
[k l] a B i m l x a D i m

In contrast, according to Scheer (2001), the distinction lies in the presence vs.
absence of the boundary-marker: in “strict” languages it is present and needs
licensing while in “permissive” languages it is absent. The difference between
Lowenstamm’s and Scheer’s conceptions of the boundary-marker is apparent in
how they analyse word-initial clusters in “permissive” languages. For Scheer, they
never form a closed domain. Consequently, the straddled empty v always requires
government, which would never reach the boundary-marker should it be there. If
we try to adapt Lowenstamm’s Hebrew examples to Scheer’s model, the repres-
entations in (3) ensue.

PG PG

(3) a. C v C V C V C v b. C v C V C V C v
| | | | | | | | | | | |
k l a B i m l x a D i m

Scheer argues on theoretical grounds: morphological information in phonology

should be privative — linguistic objects are either present or absent, and accord-
ingly, the beginning of the word is either projected into phonology or it is not.
Clearly, this is a theoretical question, closely connected to our understanding of
the nature of grammar.

2 Prosodic domains

It is well-known that all phonological rules apply within certain substrings of the
phonological utterance (including the utterance itself) called the domain of the rule.
4 Katalin Balogné Bérces

As the theory of domains, Prosodic Phonology (PP—Nespor & Vogel 1986) claims,
there exists a hierarchy of prosodic constituents which serves as the inventory from
which the rules choose their domains of application, including, besides a few de-
bated cases, the syllable, the foot, the phonological word, the phonological phrase,
the intonational phrase and the utterance. The most convincing piece of evidence
for the inevitability of PP comes from cases when the application of a given phon-
ological rule depends on nonphonological (mainly syntactic) information: under
the same segmental conditions, for example, French liaison applies in phrases of a
certain type (as in (4a), where the final /t/ of savant is pronounced) ) but fails to
do so in phrases of a different type (as in (4b), where the /t/ is not pronounced).

(4) a. un [savant]A [anglais]N ‘a learned Englishman’: liaison

b. un [savant]N [anglais]A ‘an English scientist’: final consonant deletion

It is also evident that rules select their domains of application arbitrarily. Rules
with similar structural descriptions and changes may apply within different do-
mains, as is the case of final consonant liaison in French (within the phonolo-
gical phrase) as opposed to r-liaison in English (within the utterance). Even the
same phonological rule may choose different domains in the dialects of the same
language: in English, l-darkening applies within the utterance in RP whereas it
applies within the word in several American dialects.
In CV phonology, the left word boundary is marked by the empty CV unit.
If it is the boundary-marker that makes the beginning of the word a strong phon-
ological position, it means it blocks the application of lenition rules (where ’rule’
of course means something like the interplay of forces like government and licens-
ing). It follows, then, that this empty skeletal unit can be conceived of as a general
boundary-marker which circumscribes a given rule’s domain of application, at least
in the case of segmental alternations,2 and rules taking constituents larger than
the foot as their domain.

3 How does the boundary-marker work?

Connected speech has not been given much attention in CV phonology. Tobias
Scheer (2001 and p.c.) has suggested that the boundary-marker is not present in
the lexicon but is inserted by the morpho-syntax. The insertion is governed by
a simple parameter: in certain languages it applies on the edge of the utterance
only, and at all word boundaries in others. This predicts, on the one hand, that
phonological rules can apply within the utterance or the word only. On the other
hand, it predicts that within a language, either all the rules are bound by the
utterance or all of them are bound by the word.

2 Suprasegmental features such as stress or tone are not analysed in this paper.
 Connected speech phenomena in Strict CV phonology 5

Recall the findings of PP and notice that the picture is not as simple as this:
constituents between the word and the utterance may also be designated as do-
mains. In addition, in the same utterance boundaries of the same type may block
the application of one rule but let go another. Thus we are forced to hypothes-
ise, contrary to Scheer, that the boundary-marker is part of the representation
throughout its career, its fate being determined post-syntactically only: certain
phonological rules will arbitrarily decide to ignore it and treat it as a kind of ex-
traprosodic skeletal material. The boundary-markers not ignored by a given rule
will delimit its domain by blocking its application. Besides accounting for a wider
set of empirical observations, this no-insertion analysis represents a mechanism
with less brute force.
The chart in (5) compares the insertion (5a) and the extraprosodicity (5b)
analyses of two connected speech phenomena in an American English dialect (de-
scribed in, e.g., Nespor & Vogel 1986). In this dialect, all word-final /l/’s are dark
irrespective of the following segment, which means that the domain of applica-
tion of /l/-allophony is the word, and the boundary-marker of the following word
blocks it. The rule of /t/-allophony, on the other hand, appears to operate in a
different fashion. Word-final /t/’s, although glottalised in isolation and preconson-
antally, change to a flap when followed by a vowel-initial word (up to the end of
the utterance). (For a more detailed description of the analysis, see Balogné 2001.)

(5) American English American English

/l/-darkening /t/-flapping
call = call Anita hit vs. hit Anita
blocking effect of no blocking effect
boundary-marker (or different—see §4.2)
a. insertion: boundary-marker inserted not inserted
b. “extra- it is present and has a it is present but flapping
prosodicity”: blocking effect ignores it

In Scheer’s framework (5a), the boundary-marker is expected to be projected to

phonology in a phrase like call Anita, since its blocking effect is observed, as op-
posed to a phrase like hit Anita, where the status of the word-final consonant
appears to have changed due to a following vowel, so the boundary-marker is not
assumed to be active. Therefore, Scheer predicts that in identical syntactic posi-
tions, the boundary-marker may be present or absent depending on the quality of
the final segment of the first word, which is not completely compatible with the
basic principles of GP.
In contrast, in the “extraprosodicity” approach (5b), the boundary-marker is
analysed as present and active in call Anita (since the domain of /l/-darkening is
the word so no occurrences of the empty cv can be ignored by it), but it is analysed
as present but inactive (invisible, “extraprosodic”) in hit Anita, the domain of
application of /t/-flapping being the utterance, thus all boundary-markers but
utterance-initial ones will go unnoticed.
6 Katalin Balogné Bérces

4 A typology of the effects of the extraprosodic boundary-marker

4.1 Consonant-initial words

In the table in (6), the four possible combinations of words followed by a consonant-
initial word are sketched out, showing the patterning of empty and nonempty
positions on the CV-tier in each case, assuming that the segment occupying the
underlined position is affected by some phonological rule ignoring the boundary-
marker. At the bottom, for ease of comparison, the corresponding word-internal
structures are given.

(6) Consonant-initial words

a. V#C b. V#C c. C#C d. C#C
. . . CV 〈cv〉CV . . . . . . CV 〈cv〉CV . . . . . . Cv 〈cv〉CV . . . . . . Cv 〈cv〉CV . . .

. . . CVCV. . . . . . CvCV. . .

The fact that CV phonology predicts all these situations to be identical is borne
out by the data. For example, (6b), an intervocalic consonant affected by the
phonology in the same way in both cross-word word-initial and word-internal po-
sitions is illustrated by Italian intervocalic spirantisation (Nespor & Vogel 1986 :
209), whereby all the underlined /Ù/’s (spelt 〈c〉) in the following example sentence
turn into /S/, irrespective of whether at the beginning or in the middle of a word:
Il mio criceto cerca il suo cibo negli angoli della gabbia ‘My hamster looks for its
food in the corners of the cage’.3
Hungarian regressive voicing assimilation exemplifies the configuration in (6c):
it exists as a static phonotactic constraint (*/zk/ morpheme-internally), and it
applies across morpheme (tízkor ‘at ten’ with /sk/) as well as word boundaries
(tíz kör ‘ten circles’ with /sk/).
In sum, in all the situations in (6), it is correctly predicted that the cross-
linguistic tendency is for the extraprosodicity of the boundary-marker to create
the same picture as there is word-internally.
In addition, however, a parameter reveals itself. In certain languages, e.g.,
English, the word-initial consonant (of lexical words) will always be in a strong
phonological position (i.e., licensed but ungoverned), as opposed to other lan-
guages, e.g., Italian (cf. the rule of intervocalic spirantisation, described above),
with word-initial consonants changing shape post-lexically, which suggests that in
languages of the English type the boundary-marker resists extraprosodicity in the
case of consonant-initial words—an observation whose true nature is still unclear,
but obviously this distinction is independent of the strict/permissive dichotomy
mentioned above, both English and Italian belonging to the strict type.

3 The voiced affricate /Ã/ undergoes spirantisation in the same way (and becomes /Z/).
 Connected speech phenomena in Strict CV phonology 7

4.2 Vowel-initial words

Consider the table in (7), the vowel-initial equivalent of (6). (7a) and (b) show the
two subtypes of cross-word hiatus: it is clear that again, CV phonology predicts
total identity, which is supported by plenty of data, at least for (7a); in cases of
hiatus resolution via vowel deletion, for example, it has been shown that there is a
general tendency for deleting the first vowel in all morphosyntactic environments
(Casali 1997).

(7) Vowel-initial words

a. V#V b. V#V c. C#V d. C#V
. . . CV 〈cv〉cV . . . . . . CV 〈cv〉cV . . . . . . Cv 〈cv〉cV . . . . . . Cv 〈cv〉cV . . .

. . . CVcV. . . . . . CV. . .

In (7c) and (d), however, even if the boundary-marker is extraprosodic, there re-
main some empty skeletal material between the full positions, and as a result, the
cross-word configuration is not identical to the simple word-medial CV string. Un-
fortunately, I have only come across few examples of vowels undergoing a process
as in (7d), one of them being vowel centralisation in Nawuri and related languages
(Casali 1997 : 502). Here high vowels become central in interconsonantal position,
in both “closed” and “open” syllables (in Strict CV Phonology, CVCv and CVCV,
respectively, which suggests that the trigger is the two nonempty consonants sand-
wiching the vowel). What is of interest here is what happens to vowels at word
edges. As Casali reports (unfortunately, without any examples), word-final vowels
in the CV#C environment may be affected by the change in the same way as word-
medial vowels (as predicted in (6a)) as opposed to word-initial vowels, i.e., C#VC,
which never get centralised. This difference between (6a) and (7d) is quite unex-
pected in any framework except CV (and Classical Government) Phonology. In
fact, Casali uses the Nawuri example to argue for an asymmetry existing between
word-initial and noninitial positions—an observation which naturally follows from
strict CV representations.
If we turn our attention to (7c), we discover a number of cases illustrating it, a
close inspection of which leads to a three-way classification. First, the underlined C
in (7c) may resyllabify completely into a licensed position and behave as any other
“onset”. Recall that this is the situation which is straight against CV Phonology’s
predictions, which turns out to be a strength rather than a weakness of the theory
since, as argued in Kenstowicz (1994 : 281), there are very few examples of this
kind; in fact, phonological resyllabification counts rather as an exception. One
example described by Kenstowicz comes from Spanish: a “coda” /r/ is trilled in
emphatic speech in both word-internal and word-final position (in CV phonological
terms, when followed by an empty v, which cannot license it), may be trilled when
followed by a consonant-initial word, but cannot be trilled before a vowel-initial
one. What is particularly intriguing here is that all those many other phonological
rules of Spanish affecting “coda” consonants (e.g., s-aspiration or n-velarisation)
apply differently, so this pattern seems to be the odd one out even within the
system of Spanish.
8 Katalin Balogné Bérces

Another example is /l/-darkening in certain dialects of English, e.g., RP,

whereby “coda” /l/’s become velarised, as in (8a–b), with the exception of word-
final /l/’s followed by a vowel-initial word (or suffix), which are pronounced as
“clear” as their word-internal onset peers (8c).

(8) Clear and dark /l/’s in RP

a. clear /l/’s: leap, sleep, fellow, mylord
b. dark /l/’s: spell, spelt, shelter
c. clear /l/’s: spell it, call Ann, spelling

It will be argued below that no convincing evidence has been found that these
consonants do in fact resyllabify completely rather than taking an intermediate
position (traditionally referred to as ambisyllabicity).
The second strategy that a word-final C may follow is remain a phonological
coda, e.g., l-darkening in certain American English dialects exemplified in (5). In
these cases we claim that the word-boundary represented by the boundary-marker
functions as a blockage for these rules, the (prosodic) word being the domain of
rule application — an arbitrary feature of the rules themselves.
Thirdly, the C may behave as neither an onset nor a coda but take a third
form: it is “ambisyllabic”. English readily illustrates this pattern, containing at
least two rules where the cross-word realisation of a consonant differs from both the
coda and the word-medial onset. One is the distribution of Standard American /t/-
allophones, whose well-documented characteristics are the following (cf. Balogné
2001). Within words, an onset /t/ is flapped if followed by an unstressed vowel,
but aspirated if followed by a stressed one ((9a), also in (5)). Word-final /t/’s are
(pre-)glottalised pre-pausally and pre-consonantally (9b), but flapped if the next
word starts with a vowel, irrespective of whether or not that vowel is stressed (9c).
The point is that the cross-word allophone in C#V is different from the word-
medial one (in being stress-insensitive), correctly predicted by CV phonology (for
an analysis, see Balogné 2001).

(9) General American /t/-allophones

a. á[R]om, a[th ]ómic
b. hi[ijt] me
c. hi[R] Ánn, hi[R] Aníta

Exactly the same happens in (conservative) RP /r/-allophony. /r/ undergoes

tapping/flapping, with an output identical to that of /t/-flapping, intervocalic-
ally, whenever followed by an unstressed vowel word-internally (compare (10a) and
(b)), or any vowel across words (10c).
 Connected speech phenomena in Strict CV phonology 9

(10) RP /r/-allophony
a. [R]: courage, very, sorry, baron, laurel
b. [r]: courageous, reduce, red, bright, Henry, walrus
c. [R]: for example, for instance, the other end

These examples illustrate the fact that the situation C#V is special and calls
for a theoretical equivalent of cross-word ambisyllabicity. For a possible analysis
in Strict CV Phonology, see Balogné (2001), further elaborated on in Balogné
(2002). The question is whether the “resyllabifying” rules described above (RP /l/-
darkening (8), Spanish trilled /r/) are essentially any different. It may simply be
the case that, quite unexpectedly and exceptionally, there is no phonetic difference
between the realisations of these consonants in the onset and the ambisyllabic po-
sitions, and that is why the superficial impression is that they have become onsets.

5 Further issues

In sum, the boundary-marker is assumed to be present to the left of each (lexical)

category, at least in so-called “strict” languages, and the phonological rules spelling
out the realisation of sound segments contain information about which prosodic
constituents serve as their domains of application. Formulating the syntax–pho-
nology mapping algorithm, i.e., the formation of the constituents of the prosodic
hierarchy, is beyond the scope of the present paper, so we simply accept the PP
view (e.g., that of Nespor & Vogel 1986).
Neither is the issue of so-called “permissive” languages addressed in this pa-
per. Considering cross-word phenomena, it must be remarked that even in ‘permis-
sive’ languages there are rules bounded by the prosodic constituents, e.g., Nespor
& Vogel (1986 : 213) analyses Greek s-voicing as applying within the intonational
phrase. This leads us to accept that the boundary-marker is always present, as
Lowenstamm says, even in permissive languages, and whether it is considered or
ignored during the phonological computation is at the rules’ discretion. A closer
inspection of the predictions of this analysis of permissive languages is beyond the
scope of the present paper.

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