Zero morphemes in the morphophonology of Catalan

Abstract In insular varieties of Catalan, the first person singular of the Present Indicative surfaces, for some verbs, with a final consonant cluster with rising sonority, a configuration never found in any other context or in any other dialect of Catalan. This case is compared to nominal morphology, for which phonological epenthesis has been argued to apply with masculine stems ending in the same type of cluster. I propose an alternative view, within Optimality Theory, in which the unusual sonority profile arises because no exponent is available and phonological epenthesis is ruled out by the constraint ranking. Under this view, alleged final epenthetic vowels in nominals are reinterpreted as less preferred exponents, the preferred option being the absence of an exponent.