Repair and Drift in Austronesian Languages: Avoidance of Dissimilar Labials as the Onsets of Successive Syllables

Abstract:From the time of their earliest reconstructable ancestor, Austronesian languages have avoided morphemes that allow dissimilar labials as the onsets of successive syllables. What is of interest to phonologists is that this inherited morpheme structure constraint continues to hold on the word level in many (but not all) daughter languages. As a result of the extension of phonotactic restrictions from the level of the morpheme to the level of the word, lexical bases that are affixed in ways that violate this constraint show various repairs aimed at removing a marked sequence, most commonly one in which a labial-initial base drops the initial syllable when infixed with -um-. The range of attested repair options is surveyed in relation to claims made in earlier analyses, additional support is given for previously-recognized repairs, and two new functionally-equivalent avoidance strategies are described. Finally, although the most common repair option (pseudo nasal substitution) may be inherited from Proto-Austronesian, other structurally-distinct but functionally-equivalent repairs apparently constitute a drift, namely a product of the continued operation of inherited structural pressures after language separation, a type of change that can be viewed as the diachronic counterpart of a synchronic conspiracy.