The Decomposition of Somali Nouns

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to understand the internal organization of Somali nouns. More precisely, I propose an analysis of the inflectional markers, i.e. the exponents of gender, number and syntactic case. Within a syntactic approach to noun formation, I show that a list of basic exponents can be reached throughout the phonological deconstruction of the surface forms. In addition, I argue that each phonological exponent corresponds to a unique morpho-syntactic category. On a more general level, the analysis depicted illustrates the behavior and the formation of basic and non-derived nouns in Somali, regardless the notion of "noun class".

Conditions on complex exponence: A case study of the Somali subject marker

“…That said, any analysis of MRK must take care to, or at least acknowledge that its precise function and the syntactic projection in which it is located remain a matter of debate among Somalists. Possibilities entertained include TopP (Frascarelli & Puglielli 2005, 2009, and related work), the specifier position of an IP (Lecarme 1991(Lecarme , 1995, or within K(ase)P (Lampitelli 2013). It is beyond the scope of this paper to fully entertain the syntactic ramifications of these choices.…”

“…Any analysis should also be able to account for the fact that the exponents of MRK are realizations of a single morphosyntactic property. To this end, while there have been several compelling attempts at reducing Somali's allomorphic alternations in noun and verb inflection to single underlying forms (see Bendjaballah 1998;Green & Morrison 2016;Godon 1998;Lampitelli 2013;Barillot & Ségéral 2005;Barillot, Bendjaballah & Lampitelli 2018), analyses treating the alternations exhibited by MRK in a similar way have been less successful. As such, this calls for a novel approach, and one that employs a theoretical framework capable not only of handling allomorphy, and allowing for the decomposition of inflected forms, but also one that accounts for the specific phonology associated with the MRK morpheme.…”

“…' The correlation between UMRK penultimate H and a toneless, unaffixed MRK in (13) and between UMRK final H and a toneless, affixed MRK in ( 18) is one argument often offered for the presence of a catalectic vowel slot associated with a mora at the right edge of some Somali stems (e.g., Godon 1998;Lampitelli 2011Lampitelli , 2013Le Gac 1997). This has been called the ''feminine exponent'' due to its association with stems requiring t-series ''feminine'' grammatical gender agreement.…”

“…Some have analyzed MRK as a nominative or subject case marker under the assumption that Somali is a syntactic case language. From a morphophonological perspective, this does not bear on our analysis, though it and our approach each entail certain syntactic assumptions discussed further below.4Lampitelli (2013) proposes that MRK is associated with suffix -i but no tone; UMRK, in contrast, is associated only with H tone.Phonological Data & Analysis 4(4), 2022Green & Lampitelli: Somali subject marker…”

Moraic mismatches in Somali phonology

“…For Hyman (1981), declension class, and accordingly, grammatical gender dictates the location of tone assignment, but Nilsson (2018) argues that tone assignment is independent of grammatical gender and is instead predictably distributed according to stem shape. Godon (1998), Lampitelli (2011Lampitelli ( , 2013, and Le Gac (1997) have similarly posited predictability according to stem shape, arguing that "feminine" stems have an empty catalectic slot at their right edge that is counted in tone assignment. Their analyses collectively propose that H tone is always assigned to the penultimate mora of the stem.…”