Gestural Timing and Derived Environment Effects in Norwegian Clusters

This paper considers the phonological behavior of /C/ clusters in Urban East Norwegian (henceforth UEN), as recently discussed by Kristoffersen (2000). I will argue that the phonetic realization of such clusters depends on the relative timing of the articulatory gestures associated with // and the following consonant. Specifically, the patterning of /C/ clusters lends further support to Cho's (1998a,b) phonetically-based Optimalitytheoretic (OT) approach to intergestural timing specifications. Cho's central hypothesis is that "the timing between two gestures created by morpheme concatenation is not lexically specified and is therefore potentially subject to any phonological change which can be produced by varying gestural overlap" (Cho 1998b:5). This hypothesis provides a basis for explaining derived environment effects whereby overlap in /C/ sequences is blocked within morphemes but not across morpheme or word boundaries. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 documents the derived environment effects in UEN clusters. Section 3 examines the role of gestural timing in cluster realization. Section 4 develops a phonetically-based analysis of the derived environment effects, which is then compared with two alternative OT accounts in Section 5. Finally, Section 6 concludes by considering some empirical implications of the proposed analysis, with specific reference to liquid assimilation processes observed in the Spanish of Havana, Cuba.