florian breit W E L S H M U TAT I O N A N D S T R I C T M O D U L A R I T Y W E L S H M U TAT I O N & STRICT MODULARIT Y Florian Breit Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics Department of Linguistics University College London 13th August 2019 Florian Breit: Welsh Mutation and Strict Modularity © 13th August 2019 Florian Breit principal supervisor: John Harris subsidiary supervisor: Andrew Nevins This document was typeset using the typographical look-and-feel classicthesis (version 4.2) for LYX by André Miede The type faces used are Minion Pro by Robert Slimbach and Euler by Hermann Zapf For the greater glory of God, and in memory of Uncle Peter, who taught me the importance of love, the meaning of sorrow, and the struggles of happiness Declaration I, Florian Breit, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis London, 13th August 2019 Florian Breit vii Abstract The generative view of the language faculty is premised on the modularity of mind In its most restrictive form, strict modularity, this predicts that phonological processes cannot be sensitive to syntactic information and vice versa Initial Consonant Mutation in languages such as Welsh appear to falsify the strict modularity hypothesis in relation to the morphosyntax–phonology interface This is because mutation involves the triggering of a phonologically regular process in a morphosyntactically determined environment Consider the Welsh data in (1): (1) /kaT/ ‘cat’ (a) [i XaT] ‘her cat’ (b) [i kaT] ‘his cat’ The plosive–fricative alternation in (1) cannot be purely phonological in nature, because the phonological environment in (1a) and (1b) is identical The only differentiating factor is the gender of the possessive pronoun This is problematic because it appears as though the phonology must make reference to information proper to morphosyntax Virtually all preceding accounts of Welsh mutation violate strict modularity These accounts employ ad-hoc diacritics to mark mutation environments in the morphosyntax In most accounts, the diacritics are assumed to persist across the interface into phonology, where they can trigger phonological processes Alternatively, it has been suggested that the diacritics trigger some form of suppletion on the mutation target However, approaches in the latter category also necessarily appeal to phonology in a manner not compatible with strict modularity In this thesis I propose a new model of Welsh mutation, combining the floating feature approach of Lieber (1983) with phonologically conditioned allomorphy within a Distributed Morphology framework I show that Welsh mutation can be accounted for successfully in this way without violating strict modularity The account is more restrictive and makes better predictions, in particular predicting that variation is trigger-dependent I develop the first in-depth analysis of items that are exceptionally immutable, proposing that they begin with an empty CV-sequence, a structure independently motivated by weight in Welsh and initial sC(C)-sequences in Irish ix ... confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis London, 13th August 2019 Florian... supervisor: Andrew Nevins This document was typeset using the typographical look-and-feel classicthesis (version 4.2) for LYX by André Miede The type faces used are Minion Pro by Robert Slimbach... W E L S H M U TAT I O N & STRICT MODULARIT Y Florian Breit Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy