The complexity of vowel epenthesis in Mazahua

Abstract

In this work, we focus on the analysis of vowel epenthesis in Mazahua, both regarding its motivation and the quality of the epenthetic vowels. The first aspect shows that epenthetic vowels allow the formation of syllabic trochaic feet from both nominal and verbal roots, which are underlyingly monosyllabic. When the suffix follows the roots, the epenthetic vowel is not necessary. In contrast, enclitics cannot be incorporated into the main foot of the phonological word. The second aspect shows that Mazahua has three types of epenthetic vowels: minimally marked, contextually colored, and mixed (partially unmarked and partially contextually colored). Such type of system has not been previously reported for any human language. We analyze this phenomenon within the Optimality Theory framework, and we propose a reformulation of the factorial typology of quality of the epenthetic segments by Kager (1999).