The importance of being Onset

In Balearic Catalan, verbal forms that correspond to the first person of present indicative do not show an explicit inflectional morph, unlike most dialects of Catalan. Among these forms we can find final consonantal clusters that involve a violation of the restrictions imposed by the sonority scale, according to which the degree of sonority between the segments of a syllable must be decreasing in relation to the nucleus. Furthermore, these final consonantal groups also exhibit a peculiar behavior with respect to the nominal forms. In previous approaches, these verbal clusters have been analyzed as the onsets of an empty nucleus. In this paper we are going to investigate the problems derived from this kind of approach and prove they are better analyzed by considering paradigmatic effects, such as uniformity and contrast between the members of a paradigm.