Although the discovery of underlying representations (URs) is a complex task that may be conditioned by various factors (see, e.g., Albright 2002), it has traditionally been claimed to be quite straightforward when the UR is revealed by productive and transparent morphophonemic alternations and when there is a clear and regular phonological condition in the language that justifies the disparities between the presumed UR and the corresponding surface representation. Among other possible scenarios (see, e.g., Albright 2008, Kager 2008, Pater et al. 2012), uncertainty appears when these morphophonemic alternations do not exist, when they are not fully productive and transparent, or when more than one interpretation of the UR is possible. This is the case of the URs of words beginning with 〈esC〉- in Catalan, which we discuss here.
The purpose of this squib is twofold. On the empirical side, we provide new arguments for the epenthetic...