La representación de los procesos fonológicos: a propósito del descenso vocálico del quechua

Abstract

The representation of an object or a process constitutes the researcher's hy­pothesis about what that object is or how th.at process occurs. Phonology is a 
privileged area in which this can be straightforwardly observed: the phonologi­cal ontology -the set of objects which comprise phonological phenomena­ is not given a priori; it must be constructed theoretically by the linguist in order to account for the data at bis or her disposal. In this paper, I present different ways in which the process of Quechua vowel lowering may be represented,from Trubetzkoy's conception to Optimality Theory.