Towards a non-arbitrary account of affricates and affrication

This article presents a novel account of affricates/affrication and palatalisation (and their interrelationship) in Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Québec French, as well as English and Korean, within a further development of Government Phonology. Several properties of those two phenomena follow from independently established assumptions of the theory, in particular on the internal structure of obstruents, the nature of coronality, the representation of vowel height, and the asymmetric behaviour of the elements I and U. Stopness is argued to be encoded structurally, as a relationship between two positions, and that relationship is broken up by the palatalising effect of the element I, the result of which is affrication. The conditions under which this happens fall in line with well-known properties of the triggers.