Complexité, éléments et groupes consonantiques en berbère tachelhit

This article provides new evidence for the head-complement hypothesis in Tashlhiyt verbal roots. Originally proposed to account for the distribution of consonants in triliteral roots and their behaviour towards gemination in the imperfective stem (Lahrouchi 2009, 2010), the head-complement hypothesis holds that roots containing an obstruant-sonorant sequence display a binary branching structure, where the obstruant is the head and the sonorant its complement. The complexity condition, which refers to the number of elements each segment contains, is used here to explain why the obstruents qualify for the head position in the root. In cases where complexity does not work, element geometry is mobilized to show that consonants headed by |ʔ| or |h| are stronger than other consonants