Revisiting Kabardian Phonology: A Syllabic Analysis

This paper provides an autosegmental analysis of phonological alternations in Kabardian, an Abhkaz-Adyghean language. It illustrates how several phonological re-write rules, postulated in Colarusso’s (1992) phonological analysis of Kabardian which, in some cases, lacks adequate explanation, may be uniformly reinterpreted as instances of mapping between the segmental tier and the skeletal tier in an autosegmental approach. In doing so, this paper illustrates a case where the skeletal make-up of a language may be dominant over underlying segments and be crucial in determining the output forms of a language, a process which may be translated into high-ranking constraints under a constraint-based framework. This paper, therefore, provides a more economical and explanatorily adequate analysis of Kabardian phonological alternations.