Extrametricality in Latin

Abstract

It is generally claimed that all coda consonants in Latin are moraic and therefore contribute to the weight of a syllable. Contrary to that characterisation, however, I argue that word‐final [s] was always extrametrical – as were all consonants after long vowels. That claim accounts for a number of phonological patterns that are poorly understood. Those patterns range from vowel length alternations in words like sūs ‘swine.nom.sg’ and suis ‘swine.gen.sg’ to underapplied rhotacism in words like opus ‘work’, which resists the analogical shift from [s] to [r] that is found in words like honour (< honōs) ‘honour.nom.sg’. In addition, extrametricality clarifies the idiosyncratic behaviour of word‐final [s] in Old Latin verse, in which the final syllable of a word like minus ‘less’ scans as light more often than it scans as heavy. Extrametrical consonants furthermore exhibit anomalous phonotactic patterns. For example, only word‐final [s] can create a coda with rising sonority. The resulting optimality theoretic analysis advances a detailed account of moraicity in Latin phonology and more generally informs our understanding of complex patterns in moraic structure that fall out from constraint interaction.