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Morphology and phonology

LING 481/581

Winter 2011

• Morphology-phonology interactions

• Generative phonol model vs. word-based morphological model

• 2 types of phonol alternations?

Morphemes conform to phonol shape

• Reduplication

– Agta CVC- pl.

– Tagalog pag-CV- derived N

bari 'body' bar-bari 'bodies' mag-saddu 'leak' mag-sad-saddu 'leak in many places' uffu 'thigh' uf-uffu 'thighs' ulu 'head' ul-ulu 'heads'

laakad 'walk' pag-la-laakad

kandiilah 'candle' pag-ka-kandiilah

Root-and-pattern morphology

• Modern Standard Arabic verbal derivational categories (wazan (sg.), awzaan (pl.))

• = arrangement of consonants and vowels

wazan example category template

I katab (unmarked) CVCVC

II kattab causative CVCCVC

III kaatab reciprocal CVVCVC

IX ktabab

CCVCVC

XI ktaabab

CCVVCVC

Morphology-phonology interaction

• Allomorphs of morphemes – *ʌ+/*æn+ indefinite article

• ǝ|kʌp • ǝ|morɑn • ǝ|sɩstr̩ • æ|nʌvǝn (careful speech, 2 P words: æn|ʔʌvǝn) • æ|nImbǝsǝl (careful: æn|ʔImbǝsǝl) • æ|nænt (careful: æn|ʔænt)

– Lexical entry for indefinite article /ʌ/ / ___ C; /æn/ / ___ V ‘a(n)’ cf. another

Comparison of models

what goes on in here?

“Alternants” of morphemes • Allomorphs resulting from phonological

process of language

phulak aig elpid ornith gigant hrin

Obstruents agree in voicing with following obstruent. Coronal consonants are deleted before /s/.

Comparison of models

• Generative phonological model (451) – Phonological representations consist of features. – Phonological theory should predict all and only the

kinds of phonological phenomena that occur in human languages. Formal simplicity should be directly proportional to phonological naturalness.

– Rules generate phonetic representations from more abstract phonological ones.

• Word-based morphological model (481) (‘moderate word-form lexicon’) – HS: “most lexical entries consist of (complex) words”

Comparison of models

word-based model: if morphology contains complex words, why not the phonology properties of those complex words?

HS: moderate word-form lexicon

• Both words, word-schemata in lexicon

morphological patterns as lexical entries, can be used to create new words

Comparison of models

Polish sveter ‘sweater’ (nom. sg.) krater ‘crater’ (nom. sg.) zebr ‘zebra’ (nom. sg.) svetri ‘sweater’ (nom. pl.) krateri ‘crater’ (nom. pl.) zebra ‘zebra’ (nom. pl.)

Sonorant Cluster Epenthesis 0 [e] / C __ [+sonorant]#

Type equation here.

why not here too?

maybe these contain abstract segment

maybe these are exceptions to Sonorant Cluster Epen

HS (likely) perspective

• Lexicon contains /sveter/ N /Xi/ (gender)nom.pl. ‘sweater’ (nom. sg.) /Xa/ (gender)nom.pl. /svetri/ N ‘sweater’ (nom. pl.) /zebr/ N ‘zebra’ (nom. sg.) /zebra/ N ‘zebra’ (nom. pl.) /krater/ N ‘crater’ (nom. sg.) /krateri/ N ‘crater’ (nom. pl.)

i.e. there is no Sonorant Cluster Epenthesis

• Why bother with /svetr/ N /Xi/ (gender)nom.pl. ‘sweater’ (nom. sg.) /Xa/ (gender)nom.pl. [+Sonorant Cluster Epenthesis] /svetri/ N ‘sweater’ (nom. pl.) /zebr/ N ‘zebra’ (nom. sg.) /zebra/ N ‘zebra’ (nom. pl.) /krater/ N ‘crater’ (nom. sg.) /krateri/ N ‘crater’ (nom. pl.)

HS: 2 types of phonologically conditioned alternations

• ‘many linguists would say that only automatic alternations are truly phonological, whereas morphophonological alternations are really morphological in nature’

HS examples of automatic alternations

really 2 rules /o/ *ɑ+ / ___ |

/o ɑ/ *ǝ+ / |X.__, __.X|

Type of conditioning

• Morphophonological – Trisyllabic Shortening, if a rule at all, is lexically

conditioned • nation, national [+TSS]

• notion, notional

• Automatic – Purely phonological context

• German Final Devoicing: position in word

• English Flapping: vowels, relation to stress

• Russian Akanie: relation to stress

• Japanese Palatalization: before [i]

Phonetic coherence of undergoing sounds

• Morphophonological – [p b k] not a natural class

• Automatic – natural classes

• German Final Devoicing: obstruents • English Flapping: coronal stops • Russian Akanie: /o ɑ/ (non-high back vowels) • Japanese Palatalization: voiceless alveolar obstruents

Phonetic similarity of alternants

• Morphophonological – (any X~0 ‘a wide phonetic distance’; what about English pl. and past tense?)

• Automatic

– structural description and structural change similar • German Final Devoicing: [voiced] • English Flapping: [sonorant], [approximant] • Russian Akanie: *o ɑ+ vs. *ǝ+ • Japanese Palatalization: *t s+ vs. *tɕ ɕ]

Derived-only?

• Morphophonological

– Turkish /k/ deleted before morpheme-initial vowels, but not morpheme-internally ([sokak] ‘street’)

• Automatic

– not restricted

• English Flapping: city, fattie, baddie

Application to loanwords

• Morphophonological

– may or may not apply

• Turkish k deletion ‘extended to some loanwords’ (p. 219) but not others

• Automatic

– Flapping examples?

Speech rate (in)dependence

• Morphophonological

– not sensitive to speech rate

• Automatic

– may or may not apply in slow speech

– Flapping?

Structure-preserving?

• Morphophonological

– only neutralizing: creates segments that are already contrastive

• Automatic

– may create non-contrastive segments

• Flapping

Apply across word boundaries?

• Morphophonological

– “not generally possible”

• Automatic

– “may apply across word boundaries”

• Flapping – lot of (lotta)

– sort of (sorta)

Phonological productivity? • Hayes 2009

– ‘the capacity of a rule to apply in novel circumstances...Phonological rules, just like...morphological rules, can be evaluated and classified according to their productivity.’

• Haspelmath and Sims

• Variation in productivity ‘is a typical property of affixes, but not of *automatic+ phonological rules’

• Morphophonological alternations can vary in productivity

• Morphophonological (morphophonemic) alternations ‘behave in ways that are typical of morphological structure more generally’

– not only variation in productivity

– also “back formation”

• Polish “First Palatalization”

• -yć (forms verbs), -ny (forms adj), -ek, -ka dim

• back-formed augmentatives

• back-formed augmentatives, undoing 1st Pal

ʃk

ʧk

x