Templates as the interaction of recursive word structure and prosodic well-formedness

Abstract

Templatic morphology involves the appearance of a fixed shape on a morpheme in a specific morphological context. This paper makes two claims: the morphological context of a template is syntactically cyclic, resulting in recursive prosodic word structure, and the shape of a template results from prosodic well-formedness conditions on the internal prosodic word. Templatic morphology in Chukchansi Yokuts illustrates these claims: affixes that trigger templates transfer the root to the phonology before other material is transferred, so that the root forms a prosodic word which is internal to the whole word. Roots with one underlying vowel are augmented to meet a disyllabic minimality requirement on prosodic words; the resulting disyllable forms a light–heavy iamb, to optimally satisfy Chukchansi parsing requirements. Templatic morphology falls out from the predictable interaction of the syntax–phonology interface and general phonological properties of a language, and needs no special apparatus or diacritics.

Match Theory: An overview

“…6), there are different proposals as to exactly what kinds of syntactic objects count as words, phrases, clauses that map to ω, φ, and ι, respectively, via Match constraints in (4). At the word level, for example, Guekguezian (2017) and Weber (2020) have proposed that the word-level Match constraints refer to word-internal phases rather than X 0 s in general, while Windsor (2017) has advocated plain X 0 ↔ ω matching. See §3.1 for related discussion on the phrase-level.…”

“…For the last 10 years, Match Theory (MT; Selkirk, 2011) has been an influential approach to the mapping from syntactic to prosodic structure (Bellik et al, to appear;Bennett et al, 2016Elfner, 2012Elfner, , 2015Elordieta & Selkirk, to appear;Elordieta, 2015;Féry, 2015;Guekguezian, 2017;Güneş, 2015;Hamlaoui & Szendrői, 2015Hsu, 2016;Ishihara, 2014;Ito & Mester, 2013Kalivoda, 2018;Tyler, 2019;Kratzer & Selkirk, 2020;Kügler, 2015;Myrberg, 2013;Selkirk, 2009;Van Handel, 2021;Windsor, 2017;Weber, 2020;among many others).…”

Templatic morphology as an emergent property

“…Chukchansi Yokuts exhibits a "templatic" system of morphology which can be described in terms of CV skeletons. Recently, Guekguezian (2017) has put forward an analysis which discards the morphemic templates, replacing them with a careful and more parsimonious analysis of the syntax and phonology of the language. His argument boils down to the claim that intricate phonology linearizes cyclic morphosyntax, just like in Hebrew.…”

“…First, to address roots, Guekguezian (2017) argues that the optimal foot in the language is iambic, σ µ σ µ µ . The templatic shape with is then simply an iambic foot.…”

Matching overtly headed syntactic phrases in Italian

“…(1) syntax Clause X0 XP j i phonology w £ An ongoing debate concerns which syntactic constituents are visible to Match constraints (Elfner 2012, Guekguezian 2017, Ito & Mester 2019, Tyler 2019. A distinction is frequently drawn between lexical and functional elements, such that the syntax-prosody mapping only makes reference to lexical XPs (e.g.…”