Mapudungun coronal consonants: A challenge for the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon?

In this chapter we provide an overview of Lahiri and Reetz’s Featurally Underspecified Lexicon (FUL – Lahiri and Reetz 2002, 2010, Lahiri 2018, inter alia) as a model that gives continuity to the key tenets of the featural geometric research project: uncovering a universal set of hierarchically organised phonological features that are not dissociated from their phonetic grounding. Here, our focus is on the cross-linguistic applicability of the model and its typological value. In particular, we consider whether FUL can shed light on the remarkably rich consonantal place system of the Native American language Mapudungun and the productive ‘affective’ alternations that have been shown to exist among its coronals, alongside strictly phonological instances of alveolar palatalisation. The analysis supports FUL’s strong claims for coronal underspecification and lack of feature dependencies, successfully accounting for the language’s system of contrasts and alternations. Instead of coronal-dependent features such as [±DISTRIBUTED] and [±ANTERIOR] in other models, the Mapudungun representations and processes are best captured by spreading of the non-dependant TONGUE HEIGHT and TONGUE ROOT feature nodes of FUL, which are shared across vowels and consonants.