Prefijación y apofonía en latín

Abstract

It is well known that Latin vocalism undergoes a set of changes, such as shortening, deletion, gliding, lengthening, and apophony (also called ablaut or vowel reduction). Nevertheless, these processes do not behave in the same way. Vowel shortening is due to reach a correct foot formation, i.e. the moraic trochee in Latin; vowel deletion and vowel gliding deal with syllabic structure and they have been largely studied from different perspectives. The goal of this work is to analyze the apophony in the Optimality Theory framework. This phenomenon does not depend on markedness criteria, it does not tend to optimize prosodic structures phonologically, nor affects to different prosodic levels simultaneously as shortening or deletion. On the contrary, vowel reduction arises from perceptibility and prominence issues.

DOI: 10.4424/lam92020-8