Aggressive reduplication

Abstract

I propose that there is a purely phonological drive to impose a reduplication-like structure (‘coupling’) on words. This structure can lead to enhancement or preservation of word-internal self-similarity. The case of vowel raising in Tagalog loan-stems is examined in detail. Raising can be blocked in order to preserve similarity between the stem penult and the stem ultima. The more similar the penult and ultima along various dimensions, the more likely coupling is, and thus the more likely resistance to raising. I attribute phonologically driven coupling to the activity of a constraint REDUP in generation, which shapes the way new words are lexicalised in the vowel-raising case, but also consider an alternative source for reduplicative construals (the effect of *SPEC in lexical learning). The proposal is compared to others that promote correspondence between similar or identical single segments within a word; I conclude that a relation between strings is necessary.

Stem-final obstruent variation in Korean

“…However, the variable, gradient, patterns recently attract much attention with the understanding that the exceptions and variants occur in a systematic way in many cases. The results of some recent research on the variation data (Bybee 2001;Boersma and Hayes 2001;Zuraw 2000Zuraw , 2002Zuraw , 2005Albright 2002Albright a,b, 2005Albright , 2008Albright and Hayes 2003;Pierrehumbert 2003Pierrehumbert , 2006Hayes and Londe 2006) show that the variation pattern observed in the speakers' behavior is matched by the statistical pattern in the lexicon, supporting the hypothesis that the speakers may internalize the variable lexical pattern and use the knowledge in their behavior. The important evidence in favor of the hypothesis comes from the data of productivity-testing such as loanword adaptation and wug-test (Burko 1958).…”

Looking into Segments

“…Each Q is a string of q. We know from the work of Zuraw (2002) and from research in Base-Reduplication Correspondence Theory McCarthy & Prince (1995) that surface correspondence needs to be able to relate strings of segments within the same word. The examples below are adapted from Zuraw (2002:396).…”

Phonological Assimilation in Urban Jordanian Arabic

“…This is reflected in three patterns of assimilation: (a) coronal consonants with a minor place difference (e.g., alveolar vs. palatoalveolar) may assimilate to each other only if the sonorancy of the consonants already matches; (b) coronal stops may undergo place assimilation when followed by a coronal obstruent, but not a velar obstruent; and (c) voicing and emphasis assimilations occur only if the places of the adjacent consonants are identical underlyingly or as a result of place assimilation. These results are discussed briefly in the light of recent works by MacEachern (1999), Hansson (2001, Zuraw (2002), Rose and Walker (2004), and Steriade (to appear …”

“…The intuition is that the more similar the two consonants are, the more likely that they will undergo assimilation to become identical. This line of reasoning has been applied to crosslinguistic patterns of laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions (MacEachern 1999), pseudo-reduplication (Zuraw 2002), and long-distance consonant harmony (Hansson 2001, Rose andWalker 2004), all of which show the preference for either complete identity or vast dissimilarity. The formalisms adopted in these works all echo Steriade (to appear)'s P-map theory of correspondence, which states that correspondence constraints and their intrinsic rankings are projected from a perceptual map of phonological contrasts, in that the farther apart perceptually two phonological contrasts are, the higher ranked the constraint that relates them as correspondents.…”