Abstract

Irish is characterized by a process of lenition, by which (among other changes) the coronals t, d, s become h, ɣ, h under certain morphosyntactically determined circumstances. Lenition of coronals is blocked (i.e., t, d, s remain unchanged) after other coronal consonants in certain domains, a phenomenon known as coronal blocking (CB). In a subset of CB domains s changes to t rather than remaining s, a phenomenon known as s-Fortition. In this article, it will be shown that the domain of CB and s-Fortition is the (recursive) prosodic word, as these two processes are found in right-headed as well as left-headed compounds, but not in other (noncompound) left-headed complex NPs. An optimality-theoretic analysis reveals that CB and s-Fortition are motivated by the same constraint ranking: the phonological requirement that coronal consonants be followed by other coronal consonants is more important than the selection of the morphologically correct mutation grade of a word.