An Aspect of Vowel Hiatus Resolution in the English Word Formation Process

This study observes vowel sequences across the morpheme boundary in the word formation process of English. Since a morpheme concatenation creates vowel sequences, we deal with the data in a derived environment. We argue that the first high vowels in vowel sequences become glides that have identical place and round features with the corresponding vowels. The current study differs from previous studies for vowel hiatus resolution in English in that former studies have focused only on the data where speakers utilize the segmental epenthesis strategy. In addition, the newly created glide in this study undergoes the fusion with preceding coronal consonants. However, glide formation fails to apply when a retroflex precedes the first high-front vowel, the first vowel in the vowel sequence is stressed, or the first high-back vowel has underlying palatal glide [y] before [u]. We proposed the three high-ranked constraints that prohibit the glide formation. Considering all these, we propose an analysis based on Harmonic Serialism that shows both a derivation-like rule and a consistent ranking of constraint-based theory.