A Gradient Harmonic Grammar Account of Nasals in Extended Phonological Words

The article aims at contributing to the long-standing research on prosodic organization of linguistic elements and criteria used for identifying structures. Our focus is final coronal nasals in function words Greek variability their patterns realization before lexical words. Certain coalesce stops delete fricatives, whereas others do not. We propose that this split behavior does not pertain item-specific prosody because relevant strings are uniformly prosodified into an extended phonological word (Itô & Mester 2007, 2009). It rather stems from contrastive activity level underlying forms spirit Smolensky Goldrick’s (2016) Gradient Symbolic Representations; with lower respective environments, those higher show proposed analysis captures certain gradient effects alternative analyses cannot account for.