Typology of consonantal insertions

Abstract

The present study, based on a typological survey of ca. 70 languages, offers a systematization of consonantal insertions by classifying them into three main types: grammatical, phonetic, and prosodic insertions. The three epenthesis types essentially differ from each other in terms of preferred sounds, domains of application, the role of segmental context, their occurrence cross-linguistically, the extent of variation and phonetic explication. The present investigation is significantly different from other analyses of consonantal epentheses in the sense that it neither invokes markedness nor diachronic state of the processes under discussion. Instead, it considers the different nature of the epenthetic segments by referring to the representational levels and/or domains which are relevant for their appearance.