Morphological Length and Prosodically Defective Morphemes

Abstract

This book investigates the phenomenon of Morphological Length-Manipulation: processes of segment lengthening, shortening, deletion, and insertion that cannot be explained by phonological means but crucially rely on morpho-syntactic information. A unified theoretical account of these phenomena is presented and it is argued that Morphological Length-Manipulation is best analysed inside the framework termed ‘Prosodically Defective Morphemes’: if all possible Prosodically Defective Morpheme representations and their potential effects for the resulting surface structure are taken into account, instances of length-manipulating non-concatenative morphology and length-manipulating morpheme-specific phonology are predicted. The argumentation in this book is hence in line with the general claim that all morphology results from combination and that non-concatenative exponents are epiphenomenal and arise from affixation of autosegmental elements. Although this position has been defended various times for specific phenomena, it has rarely been discussed against the background of a broad typological survey. In contrast to most existing claims, the argumentation in this book is based on a representative data set for attested morphological length-manipulating patterns in the languages of the world that serves as basis for the theoretical arguments. It is argued that alternative accounts suffer from severe under- and overgeneration problems if they are tested against the full range of attested phenomena.

Being exceptional is being weak: Tonal exceptions in San Miguel el Grande Mixtec

“…Archangeli, 1988;Inkelas, 1995;Krämer, 2000Krämer, , 2001 or prosodic defectivity (e.g. Yearley, 1995;Stiebels & Wunderlich, 1999;Zimmermann, 2017c). The new perspective in this paper is that all phonological representations have a strength of activity or presence in an underlying representation.…”

The subsegmental structure of German plural allomorphy

“…Recent work in the GNA approach has shown that even cases of nonconcatenative morphology that seem to be inherently procedural, such as morphologically triggered shortening, segment deletion and polarity receive a natural analysis in this general framework (Bye and Svenonius 2012;Zimmermann 2013;Trommer and Zimmermann 2014;Trommer 2014Trommer , 2015Zimmermann 2017). German plurals have been taken as a different type of challenge to the Concatenativist Hypothesis.…”

“…Autosegmental Colored Containment Theory (Zimmermann 2014(Zimmermann , 2017Trommer 2011Trommer , 2015Zaleska 2018;Paschen 2018) is an implementation of the restrictive original version of Optimality Theory proposed in Prince and Smolensky (1993) in that it adopts hierarchical autosegmental representations and the Containment requirement on candidate generation. In a nutshell, containment-based systems retain unpronounced phonological structure as floating material in the output of phonological computation-a possibility coming for free in any formalism adopting hierarchical autosegmental and prosodic representations-allowing direct comparison between inputs and outputs and thus obviating the overly powerful coindexing mechanism of Correspondence Theory for implementing faithfulness constraints (Walther 2001).…”

Franconian tones fare better as tones than as feet: a reply to Köhnlein (2016)

“…(We have no similarly anecdotal evidence in the case of the Franconian tonal minimal pairs.) Non-productive cases of subtractive morphology typically arise as a result of phonological changes, as must have happened in cases like French [oef~ø] oeuf~oeufs 'egg.SG~PL' and [ɔs~o] os~os 'bone.SG~PL' (where the lowered vowel in the singular is independently conditioned by the presence of a coda consonant), and more generally in Cushitic, as in Murle onyiit~onyii 'rib.SG~PL', rottinr otti 'warrior.SG~PL ' (Arensen 1982: 40, cited from Payne 2006 or Arbore lassan~lássa 'loaf', nebelin~nebel 'cock ostrich.SG~PL' (Hayward 1984: 159ff, cited from Corbett 2000Zimmermann 2017: ch. 3 provides a discussion of two phonological mechanisms producing subtraction).…”

“…sg ~ pl ’ (Arensen 1982: 40, cited from Payne 2006: 45) or Arbore lassan ~ lássa ‘loaf’, nebelin ~ nebel ‘cock ostrich. sg ~ pl ’ (Hayward 1984: 159ff, cited from Corbett 2000: 17; Zimmermann 2017: ch. 3 provides a discussion of two phonological mechanisms producing subtraction).…”