Disyllabic hypocoristics in Chilean Spanish: a stratal OT analysis

Abstract

Abstract Hypocoristics have received considerable interest from phonologists in recent decades, particularly within the Optimality-theoretic literature. While most of these analyses have been situated in parallelist OT, I claim that this architectural choice entails hidden complexities. It is cross-linguistically common for multiple hypocoristics to be formed from a single proper noun, e.g., Matthew → Matt / Matty . In this case, parallelist OT must resort to co-phonologies to avoid ranking paradoxes, which results in significant analytical complexity. By contrast, I argue in this paper that a stratal analysis is crucial for capturing multiple patterns of Hypocoristic Formation (HF) within a single architecture. I present here data of disyllabic hypocoristics from Standard Chilean Spanish. These hypocoristics are derived from the proper nouns by means of two separate anchoring sites: to the left edge of the full name, or to prominence in the full name, i.e., the tonic syllable. In addition, hypocoristics may be prosodically- or morphologically-driven: they may solely be formed by truncating the material of the proper noun, or, in the latter case, there may also be additional suffixal material provided. These data, therefore, lend themselves to a four-way categorisation. I show that this categorisation can be fully accounted for within a stratal architecture, and without the need for additional co-phonologies. Within the analysis, I locate each of the anchoring sites within the lexical phonology: edge-anchoring occurs at the stem level, along with syllabification and stress assignment, while prominence-anchoring occurs at the word level. In this way, the input to edge-anchoring at the stem level comprises a string of segments, while the input to prominence-anchoring at the word-level contains prosodic units up to the foot, which permits word-level HF to anchor to prominence. I further posit that prosodic- and morphologically-driven HF are caused through the passing of hypocoristic morphemes from the morpho-syntax to the phonology. Purely prosodic HF is triggered through a null or covert morpheme, while morphological HF triggered by an overt one. The hypocoristic morphemes themselves are stored as diacritics in the proper nouns’ lexical entries. Furthermore, the constraints that select the hypocoristic forms as optimal are sensitive to the presence of this hypocoristic morpheme, which is reflected in tableaux through indexing. When a hypocoristic morpheme is present in the input of a proper noun to a particular stratum, these highly-ranked indexed constraints select a corresponding hypocoristic form as optimal. If the hypocoristic morpheme is absent, these constraints do not assign violations, and the proper noun is instead (vacuously) found optimal. This analysis thus unifies two distinct patterns of HF in one phonological grammar through the inclusion of indexed-constraints and the serial derivation in a constraint-based architecture.