Unexpected hiatus and base-identity in the Spanish verbal paradigm

Abstract

Most accounts of standard Spanish phonology report that the high vowels /i/ and /u/ surface as the glides [j] and [w] respectively when followed by a vowel of rising sonority. Nevertheless, cases of exceptional hiatus are documented in the verbal paradigm when vowel-final stems are concatenated to vowel-initial inflectional suffixes (i.e. confi-amos [koɱ.fi.á.mos] entrust (1PL)). The analysis developed here demonstrates that the failure for gliding to apply in this morphological context is a Paradigm Uniformity effect, whereby the unstressed high vowel surfaces as a moraic segment as a way of maintaining a uniform [V.V] sequence throughout the inflectional paradigm. Moreover, it is shown that underapplication of gliding in forms like [koɱ.fi.á.mos] complies with a morphological requirement that the stem in a derived word be phonologically identical to another form (i.e. a base) in the same paradigm. These data are shown to be theoretically challenging for the Optimal Paradigms approach to Paradigm Uniformity (McCarthy 2005), which does not acknowledge the presence of a base in inflectional morphology.