Title

<blust@hawaii.edu>

Department of Linguistics
University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Antiantigemination: An Austronesian preference

In 1986 John J. McCarthy drew attention to what he called 'antigemination effects' in a number of languages which suspend otherwise general syncope processes just between identical consonants. He attributed the cause of this behavior to a universal phonological principle, the so-called 'Obligatory contour principle' (OCP). Odden (1988) found serious methodological flaws in McCarthy's argument, and pointed out that a few languages delete vowels only between identical consonants, a process that he called 'antiantigemination' (AAG).  The purpose of my talk is to show that AAG is not a rare or unusual phenomenon at all, but is one of the two most common syncope processes found in the Austronesian family, comprising about one-fifth of the world's languages.  I will argue that AAG is neither phonetically nor phonologically motivated, but is driven by inherited structural pressures relating to canonical shape.  As such it constitutes a prime example of drift, and may ultimately be implicated in the well-known drift by which many Oceanic languages came to associate reduplicated bases with intransitive verbs and unreduplicated bases with their transitive  counterparts.