Morphology and Phonotactics

Abstract

Phonotactics is the study of restrictions on possible sound sequences in a language. In any language, some phonotactic constraints can be stated without reference to morphology, but many of the more nuanced phonotactic generalizations do make use of morphosyntactic and lexical information. At the most basic level, many languages mark edges of words in some phonological way. Different phonotactic constraints hold of sounds that belong to the same morpheme as opposed to sounds that are separated by a morpheme boundary. Different phonotactic constraints may apply to morphemes of different types (such as roots versus affixes). There are also correlations between phonotactic shapes and following certain morphosyntactic and phonological rules, which may correlate to syntactic category, declension class, or etymological origins. Approaches to the interaction between phonotactics and morphology address two questions: (1) how to account for rules that are sensitive to morpheme boundaries and structure and (2) determining the status of phonotactic constraints associated with only some morphemes. Theories differ as to how much morphological information phonology is allowed to access. In some theories of phonology, any reference to the specific identities or subclasses of morphemes would exclude a rule from the domain of phonology proper. These rules are either part of the morphology or are not given the status of a rule at all. Other theories allow the phonological grammar to refer to detailed morphological and lexical information. Depending on the theory, phonotactic differences between morphemes may receive direct explanations or be seen as the residue of historical change and not something that constitutes grammatical knowledge in the speaker’s mind.

Consonant-vowel Interactions Inform Paradigm Organization in Egyptian Arabic

“…This analysis also aligns with the cross-linguistic pattern in which phonotactic restrictions seem to be stricter in smaller morphological domains, for example, in roots as opposed to morphologically complex words (Gouskova 2018). In Egyptian Arabic wazn I verbs, avoidance of phonotactically marked consonantvowel sequences is much stronger in imperfective than perfective forms because imperfective forms are morphologically simpler (including just VoiceP and no T projection).…”

The Fine Structure of the Comparative

“…If we simply specified more for the features C1 and C2, similarly to the Czech suffix -k in (37), we would expect that the root would have to move to the left of more (deriving *intelligentmore), just like in Czech the root moves to the left of -k. In order to satisfactorily address this issue, we need to return to the spellout algorithm, and extend it to account for comparative markers preceding the adjectival root. 19 A lexical approach to the distinction between morphological and periphrastic comparatives in English is also taken by Bobaljik (2012); Gouskova & Ahn (2016), among others. This is not to deny that there might be certain phonological or other regularities governing the choice for either option.…”