Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

 This talk examines three apparent exceptions to general processes in the phonology and morphology of standard Yiddish. These are 1) the resistance of several final potentially syllabic consonants to syllabication; 2) the insertion of an extra consonant [n] in some infinitives; and 3) the absence of some diminutive patterns from some nouns. All three cases are resolved by showing that some phonetically short segments are in fact underlyingly long ones, created by morpheme concatenation. The analysis, conducted within CVCV phonology (Lowenstamm 1996), thus argues for virtual, or “non surface-true” length.