Segment-to-syllable alignment and vocalization in Chilean Spanish

This paper analyzes the vocalization of stop consonants that occurs in Chil ean Spanish as a strategy to avoid the emergence of consonantal segments th at may not be aligned with the left edge of a syllable. Vocalization is the best alternative to grammars that are pressed to parse every consonantal s egment in syllable initial position but do not want to do so at the expense of losing or gaining segments. By providing an unfaithful correspondent th at is nonconsonantal, output forms are able to avoid the emergence of misal igned consonants and still hold the position of the offending segment. Cons onant-to-syllable alignment constraints also force the simplification of co mplex onsets when the first member of the cluster is a voiced stop whose ou tput correspondent may not surface as such due to an independent process of spirantization. But even in this case, vocalization also serves to avoid t he parsing of a consonant in a position that is not leftmost within the syl lable since the second member of the cluster becomes syllable initial. Desp ite ridding the output form of misaligned consonants, vocalization cannot c ompletely erase but simply shift markedness from the coda to the nucleus be cause it requires the formation of a diphthong. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B .V. All rights reserved.