Multiple feature affixation in Seenku plural...
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Pre-publication version, please use caution in citing, to appear in Morphology (journal) Multiple feature affixation in Seenku plural formation Laura McPherson (Dartmouth College) Abstract Nominal plural formation in Seenku involves two surface changes: fronting of the final vowel and raising of the final tone. Diachronically, the plural patterns likely derive from a suffix *-˝ ı, which has been obscured through the loss of falling sonority diphthongs. By comparing plural formation to other morphophonological processes in Seenku, this paper argues that the plural suffix has been restructured as a featural suffix consisting of two features: the vocalic feature [+front], resulting in vowel fronting, and the tonal feature [+raised], resulting in tone raising. Given the atomic nature of the morphosyntactic feature plural, Seenku plural formation represents a strong case of multiple feature affixation, albeit a case that can be ac- counted for through Max constraints on feature values (Lombardi 1998, 2001, etc.) and Realize-Morpheme (van Oostendorp 2005, Trommer 2012) rather than the constraint Max-Flt argued for by Wolf (2007). A level-ordered approach retaining the vocalic suffix is also considered but is shown to suffer from a number of short- comings, particularly with respect to tone and a challenging class of nasal stems. In short, this paper explores how the synchronic grammar copes with the vestiges of affixal morphology in a language that has undergone heavy reduction. 1 Introduction Seenku (ISO 639-3 [sos], exonym Sambla or Sembla) is a Northwestern Mande language of Burkina Faso with very little apparent affixation. The majority of morphosyntactic meanings are conveyed either analytically or through what appear to be patterns of base modification. The nominal plural is, at first glance, no exception. On the surface, the plural is marked by tonal and/or vocalic modifications to the root, as shown in the following singular-plural pairs: 1 (1) Singular Plural Gloss a. b‚ EE b` EE ‘pig(s)’ b. s˝ u s˝ ui ‘antelope(s)’ c. kˆ a k˝ E ‘yam(s)’ 1 Data are transcribed largely in IPA but with a few changes designed to bring Seenku writing in line with other orthographies in the region. Thus, IPA /j/ is written as <y>;/é/ is written as <gy>;/Ã/ is written as <j>; and /c/ and <ky>. The four tones are transcribed in the following ways: extra low (X) is marked with a double grave accent <‚ a>, low (L) with a grave accent <`a>, high (H) with an acute accent <´ a>, and super high (S) with a double acute accent <˝ a>. Common contours include L-S, marked with a hacek <ˇ a>, H-X, marked with a circumflex <ˆ a>, and S-X, marked with an umlaut <¨ a>. Tones are marked only on the initial vowel of a long vowel or diphthong and only on the main vowel of a sesquisyllabic word like t@gˆ E ‘chicken’; see §5.2 for more discussion of sesquisyllabicity and tone. 1
Transcript of Multiple feature affixation in Seenku plural...
Pre-publication version, please use caution in citing, to appear inMorphology (journal)
Multiple feature affixation in Seenku plural formationLaura McPherson (Dartmouth College)
Abstract
Nominal plural formation in Seenku involves two surface changes: fronting ofthe final vowel and raising of the final tone. Diachronically, the plural patternslikely derive from a suffix *-ı, which has been obscured through the loss of fallingsonority diphthongs. By comparing plural formation to other morphophonologicalprocesses in Seenku, this paper argues that the plural suffix has been restructuredas a featural suffix consisting of two features: the vocalic feature [+front], resultingin vowel fronting, and the tonal feature [+raised], resulting in tone raising. Giventhe atomic nature of the morphosyntactic feature plural, Seenku plural formationrepresents a strong case of multiple feature affixation, albeit a case that can be ac-counted for through Max constraints on feature values (Lombardi 1998, 2001, etc.)and Realize-Morpheme (van Oostendorp 2005, Trommer 2012) rather than theconstraint Max-Flt argued for by Wolf (2007). A level-ordered approach retainingthe vocalic suffix is also considered but is shown to suffer from a number of short-comings, particularly with respect to tone and a challenging class of nasal stems.In short, this paper explores how the synchronic grammar copes with the vestigesof affixal morphology in a language that has undergone heavy reduction.
1 Introduction
Seenku (ISO 639-3 [sos], exonym Sambla or Sembla) is a Northwestern Mande languageof Burkina Faso with very little apparent affixation. The majority of morphosyntacticmeanings are conveyed either analytically or through what appear to be patterns of basemodification. The nominal plural is, at first glance, no exception. On the surface, theplural is marked by tonal and/or vocalic modifications to the root, as shown in thefollowing singular-plural pairs:1
(1) Singular Plural Glossa. b‚EE bEE ‘pig(s)’b. su sui ‘antelope(s)’c. ka kE ‘yam(s)’
1Data are transcribed largely in IPA but with a few changes designed to bring Seenku writing in linewith other orthographies in the region. Thus, IPA /j/ is written as <y>; /é/ is written as <gy>; /Ã/is written as <j>; and /c/ and <ky>. The four tones are transcribed in the following ways: extra low(X) is marked with a double grave accent <‚a>, low (L) with a grave accent <a>, high (H) with anacute accent <a>, and super high (S) with a double acute accent <a>. Common contours include L-S,marked with a hacek <a>, H-X, marked with a circumflex <a>, and S-X, marked with an umlaut <a>.Tones are marked only on the initial vowel of a long vowel or diphthong and only on the main vowel ofa sesquisyllabic word like t@gE ‘chicken’; see §5.2 for more discussion of sesquisyllabicity and tone.
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In (1a), the sole difference between the singular and the plural is tonal. In (1b), thenucleus of the syllable /u/ in the singular becomes the diphthong ui (pronounced [u
“i]) in
the plural, but the tone remains the same. In (1c), there is both a tonal change from H-Xto S as well as a vocalic change from /a/ to [E].
As I discuss in §3 and §4.3, the diachrony of the data patterns is clear but the questionremains: How has this erstwhile system been restructured? In this paper, I will argue thatthese apparent base modification patterns are indeed the result of affixation in Seenku butof phonological features instantiating morphosyntactic categories rather than indepen-dent phonological elements, such as tones or segments. Specifically, the plural consists oftwo phonological features, a vocalic feature [+front] and a tonal feature [+upper]. Thispair of features is suffixed to the root, triggering changes in the final vowel and tone. Thesurface form is chosen by a constraint-based grammar optimizing the realization of thesuffixal features and the preservation of root contrasts.
There are a number of implications of this analysis. First, it adds to a growing bodyof work on featural affixes (McCarthy 1983, Lieber 1987, Wiese 1994, Akinlabi 1996, Wolf2007, Trommer 2012 etc.), showing that this is a viable and not uncommon phenomenoncross-linguistically. Second, the tonal patterns support a system of tone features alongthe lines of that envisioned by Yip (1980) or Pulleyblank (1986). Moreover, these tonefeatures are shown to be very active in Seenku morphology beyond the plural as featuralaffixes, which is rarely reported in the literature as compared to segmental features like[voice] or [nasal]. Third, since both vocalic and tonal changes result from the affixation ofa feature, the plural in Seenku illustrates another case of multiple feature affixation;given the atomic nature of the morphosyntactic feature plural, I argue that these twofeatures cannot be decomposed into multiple morphemes, as argued by Trommer (2012)for other cases of putative multiple feature affixation. However, I show that there isno need for Wolf’s (2007) Max-Flt approach to multiple feature affixation, in whichthere is special faithfulness to floating elements, since a combination of Max constraintson feature values (Lombardi 1998, 2001; Zhang 2000; Kim and Pulleyblank 2004) andRealize-Morpheme (van Oostendorp 2005, and favored by Trommer 2012) can accountfor Seenku plural formation and other morphological processes. Finally, there is a classof nouns in Seenku that end either in a floating nasal or in a nasal coda. The formeris unable to dock tautomorphemically (Wolf 2007) in the singular; in the plural, thevowel of the root is nasalized, suggesting that the docking of a featural affix on a vowelis enough to render that vowel non-tautomorphemic from the standpoint of the floatingnasal. I thus propose a modification to the constraint NoTautoMorphemicDockingwhose ramifications can be empirically tested by looking at other languages with bans ontautomorphemic docking. These data patterns are discussed in §7.
Featural affixation is not the only conceivable way to treat the synchronic data pat-terns. Vowel and/or tone coalescence may also explain the patterns, but a distinctionbetween plural formation on the one hand and nearly identical antipassive formation onthe other shows that such an analysis would require a stratal approach (e.g. Kiparsky1982, 2000), with plural formation preserving stem length distinctions by deleting the suf-fix’s mora and antipassive formation neutralizing them by retaining the mora. I discussthe viability of the stratal approach in light of other morphological processes in Seenkuin §6, showing that it faces a number of issues particularly in terms of tonal behaviorand in level ordering. While floating nasal stems are well accounted for with a vocalicsuffix, stems with nasal codas provide additional evidence that such an approach cannot
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be defended. Featural affixation provides a straightforward way to account for all of thedata patterns.
The paper is structured as follows: In §2, I introduce the language and lay out thevowel and tone inventories that provide the relevant background to plural formation. §3briefly discusses plural formation in related Samogo languages to set the stage for Seenkuplural formation, whose data patterns and diachrony are laid out in §4. The featuralapproach is detailed in §5, first demonstrating the mechanics of featural affixation beforeformalizing it with a constraint-based grammar in §5.3. §6 considers a level-orderedalternative approach, and the two analyses are tested with challenging data from nasalstems in §7, where the featural analysis is shown to account for a wider range of data.Finally, §8 concludes.
2 Background
2.1 Language and data
Seenku is a Northwestern Mande language of the Samogo subfamily spoken by a totalof around 16,000 people in southwestern Burkina Faso (Lewis et al. 2016). It has twoprimary dialects, Northern Seenku (endonym Timiku, named for Karangasso, the centerof the dialect zone) with 5,000 speakers and Southern Seenku (endonym Gbeneku, namedfor Bouende, the center of its dialect zone) with 11,000 speakers. There exists a sketchgrammar of Northern Seenku (Prost 1971) and a master’s thesis (Congo 2013) on aspectsof Southern Seenku phonology, but the language is otherwise undescribed.
The data for this paper are drawn from primary field notes on Southern Seenku gath-ered with speakers in Burkina Faso and New York City from 2013-2016.
2.2 Vowel inventory
Seenku displays a typical Mande vowel inventory, with a seven-way contrast in qualityfor oral vowels, shown in (2):
(2)
u
o
O
a
E
e
i
A near minimal set for the seven vowel qualities is given in (3):2
2The alveolar plosive /t/ is realized as the affricate [ts] before high vowels.
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(3) Oral vowels/u/ tsu ‘hippo’/o/ t‚o ‘know’/O/ tO ‘leave’/a/ ta ‘fire’/E/ tE ‘who’/e/ te (genitive particle)/i/ tsı ‘unmarried’
Length is contrastive and is preserved in the plural, which I will argue to support a featuralrather than vocalic plural suffix. The following provides minimal or near minimal pairsfor vowel length in oral vowels:
(4) Long vs. short oral vowels/u/ su ‘antelope’ /uu/ suu ‘directly’/o/ fo ‘fonio’ /oo/ foo ‘wind’/O/ (mo) d‚O ‘(my) shoulder’ /OO/ d‚OO ‘beer’/a/ ka ‘griot’ /aa/ kaa ‘fight’/E/ kyE ‘vagina’ /EE/ kyEE ‘plant sp.’/e/ j@be ‘clothes’ /ee/ (mo) ky@bee ‘(my) kidneys’/i/ sı ‘tree sp.’ /ii/ s‚ıi ‘water jar’
This seven-way contrast is collapsed to a five-way contrast in nasal vowels; [+ATR] midvowels have no nasal counterparts. Minimal pairs for nasality are given in (5):
(5) Oral vs. nasal vowels/u/ ts‚u ‘thatch’ /u
˜/ (m‚O
˜) ts‚u
˜‘(person’s) skin’
/O/ (‚a) k‚O ‘(his) bone’ /O˜/ (‚a) k‚O
˜‘(his) head’
/a/ b‚a ‘do’ /a˜/ ba
˜‘hit’
/E/ t@gE ‘chickens’ /E˜/ t@gE
˜‘cheeks’
/i/ bı ‘goats’ /i˜/ bı
˜‘horn’
For a discussion of vocalic features, see §5.1.
2.3 Tonal inventory
Seenku is a four-tone language, contrasting the levels X (extra low), L (low), H (high),and S (super high). However, as we will see, L is largely confined to derived forms, suchas the plural. These tones can also combine into numerous contour tones, including H-X,S-X, L-S, X-H-X, L-S-X, and H-S. The Tone Bearing Unit (TBU) is the syllable, and eachsyllable can host up to three tones, though I have only seen this latter situation on longvowels. If a rising tone or tritone sequence is applied grammatically on a light syllable,the vowel typically lengthens to accommodate it.
Examples of minimal pairs for the underlying level tones (X, H, S) include:
(6) a. X ‚a 3sgH a 2sg
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b. H mo 1sgS mı 1pl
c. X ts‚u ‘thatch’S su ‘antelope’
Pronominal forms are used here to contrast H with both X and S, since we find a system-atic gap in level H for nouns. In its place, we find a large number of H-X contour tones.Examples of contrast with H-X include:
(7) a. X ts‚u ‘thatch’H-X tsu ‘hippopotamus’
b. H-X sı ‘female (cow, etc.)’S sı ‘tree sp.’
As I will show in §5.2, the surface H-X singular nouns are best analyzed as H underlyingly,with the X-tone added as a repair for a category-specific tonotactic restriction against finalH.
Finally, the following table illustrates contour tones in Seenku. Note that only L-Sand X-H need to be invoked underlyingly. H-X and X-H-X are argued to be createdthrough a process of epenthesis to satisfy tonotactic constraints while all others involveeither grammatical tone or are derived from coalescence:3
(8) Contour tones
H-X da ‘mouth’X-H-X d‚aa ‘basket hanger’L-S na ‘future auxiliary’L-S-X naa ‘have come’ (perfect)S-X nıO ‘have eaten’ (perfect)H-S moo ‘1sg past’H-L moo ‘1sg genitive’
Asymmetries in tone distribution and featural explanations for them will be discussed in§5.2.
Before turning to Seenku plural formation, I briefly detour to related Samogo lan-guages, which will set the stage for the Seenku analysis.
3 A brief detour to other Samogo languages
The Samogo language family is scantily documented. According to Lewis et al. (2016), thesubfamily contains Bankagooma, Duungoma, Dzuungoo, Jowulu, and Seenku; Vydrine(2009) adds Kpeengo to this list. Apart from the descriptions of Seenku listed in theintroduction, only two others have any published descriptions of the morphophonology,Jowulu (Djilla et al. 2004) and Dzuungoo (Solomiac 2014), while Duungoma has beenthe subject of an SIL survey (Hochstetler 1994) and a description of the adjectival system
3For example, S-X mı‚ı derives from the coalescence of mı l‚E ‘1pl subordinate’. H-S moo likewise derivesfrom the coalescence of mo lE ‘1sg past’.
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(Trobs 2008). Dzuungoo and Duungoma provide the closest parallels to Seenku pluralformation. First, Duungoma shows a plural suffix -i, which usually amalgamates with thedefinite -rO to produce -rE, but can also appear on its own (Trobs 2008). For instance:
(9) a. ta˜a˜-rE
woman-pl.def‘the women’
b. ta˜a˜-i
woman-pl‘women’
Trobs states that the tonal analysis is preliminary, so it is yet unclear whether the pluralhas any tonal effects on the stem.
Dzuungoo likewise has two plural suffixes, a definite plural suffix -ree and an indefiniteplural suffix -ı. I will concentrate on the latter, which shows a greater resemblance to theSeenku system. Solomiac analyzes the suffix as a L-toned /i/ accompanied by a floatingH tone.4 Examples of singular/plural pairs include:
(10) a. modzınperson
+ -ıpl.indef
→ modzın-ıperson-pl.indef
‘people’
b. vıdog
+ -ıpl.indef
→ vı-ıdog-pl.indef
‘dogs’
The floating H tone docks onto the final syllable of the noun, replacing its underlyingtone; the L-toned suffix -ı then follows. For the behavior of another Dzuungoo high vowelsuffix and its effect on other vowels, see §4.3.
4 Seenku plural formation
Seenku has undergone a large amount of morphophonological reduction, even comparedto its closest relatives. There is no definite marking, and other overt suffixes such as theDuungoma perfective -ra have been lost, leaving only tonal changes behind (see (36)).The plural is no exception. Rather than a clearly segmentable suffix like -i, Seenku pluralis expressed through apparent base modification patterns consisting of vowel fronting,tone raising, or both. In §4.1, I lay out the patterns of vocalic changes in the plural, thenaddress tonal changes in §4.2.
4Dzuungoo is a three-tone language, contrasting L, M and H.
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4.1 Vocalic patterns
In the plural, stems whose final vowel is front (henceforth “front vowel stems”) show novocalic changes:
(11) Front vowel stems in singular and pluralSingular Pluralbı ‘goat’ bı ‘goats’b‚EE ‘pig’ bEE ‘pigs’ky‚er‚e ‘day’ kyere ‘days’
When the stem-final vowel is /a/ in the singular (henceforth “low vowel stems”), it surfacesas [E] in the plural:
(12) Low vowel stems in singular and pluralSingular Pluralj‚oNwa ‘cat’ j‚oNwE ‘cats’ka ‘griot’ kE ‘griots’
Finally, when the stem-final vowel is a back vowel (“back vowel stems”, all of which arealso round in Seenku), we find diphthong formation: a front vowel of the same height andATR value takes the place of the back vowel, which is relegated to a non-syllabic glidebefore the front vowel (the usual realization of the first vowel of a diphthong). I explicitlymark the non-syllabic nature of the diphthong-initial element in this section for clarity:
(13) Back vowel stems in singular and pluralSingular Pluralsu ‘antelope’ su
“i ‘antelopes’
g‚OO ‘field’ gO“EE ‘fields’
s‚o ‘horse’ so“e ‘horses’
It is important to note that these glides retain the same features as the original stemvowel and are not all the high back glide [w]; consultants correct my pronunciation whenemploying [w] across the board. Further evidence for this differentiation comes fromthe fact that high vowels, including non-syllabic high glides, palatalize /s/ to [S] (i.e.‘antelopes’ is pronounced [Su
“i]), which we never see in forms like so
“e ‘horses’.
In sum, front vowels are unchanged, the low vowel becomes [E], and back vowels becomeback-front diphthongs retaining original specifications of height, ATR, and length.
4.2 Tonal patterns
The nominal plural is also characterized by a process of tone raising, in which X raises toL and H raises to S; since S is already the highest tone in the language, singular S nounsremain S in the plural.
Examples of X raising to L include:
(14) a. b‚EE → bEE ‘pig(s)’
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b. j‚u˜→ ju
˜i˜‘hill(s)’
c. m‚O˜→ mO
˜E˜‘person(s)’
In (14a), the tonal change is the only audible marker of the plural since the stem ends in afront vowel. In (14b) and (14c), the tone change accompanies the vowel fronting process.This plural tone raising of X to L is the source of many surface L tones in the language.
As first mentioned in §2.3, there is a systematic gap in level H-toned singular nouns.Instead, there is a large number of H-X contours, and these singular nouns take S in theplural:
(15) a. bı → bı ‘goat(s)’
b. ka → kE ‘yam(s)’
c. gOO → gOEE ‘tree(s)’
The theoretical significance of this point will be highlighted in the next subsection.Finally, S in the singular is already as high as a tone can go in Seenku, and thus the
plural involves no audible tone change.5
(16) a. gya → gyE ‘cage(s)’
b. m‚aafO → m‚aafOE ‘gun(s)’
c. su → sui ‘antelope(s)’
All of these examples involve low- or back-vowel stems, where vocalic changes result in anaudibly different plural form. For S-toned front-vowel stems, such as tsı ‘mortar’, whereneither vocalic nor tonal changes would be audible, speakers report that the word “hasno plural”, and an explicit quantifier, typically m‚oma
˜‘a lot’ must be used.
4.3 From Samogo to Seenku: The diachrony of Seenku plurals
If we compare Seenku’s plural formation to that of Dzuungoo, its origins are clear. First,on the tonal side, rather than replacing the final tone with H, the floating tone simplyraises it one step from its original tone. On the vocalic side, the loss of falling sonoritydiphthongs, including /ei, Ei/, would lead to the surface forms seen in Seenku today. Here,we can draw on data from Dzuungoo beyond plural formation, such as the nominalizingsuffix -i, to understand the effects of front vowel suffixes on stem vowels. This suffix
5Occasionally, when giving the singular and plural back-to-back, speakers will pronounce the pluralform even higher than the singular, even though there is no phonemic tone level at that height. Thisseems to reflect the speaker’s metalinguistic awareness that the plural involves tone raising. In runningspeech, I have not noticed such raising, but I would not be surprised to see it used for emphasis or otherpragmatic reasons.
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causes the preceding vowel to front, just like we see in Seenku, but the suffix remains onthe surface as [j]. For instance (Solomiac 2007: 87):
(17) Dzuungoo nominal derivationa. fı ‘buy’ fıı ‘(a) purchase’
sen ‘take’ sejn ‘baggage’b. ta ‘heat up’ tEj ‘cooking’c. tO ‘know’ twEj ‘knowledge’
bo ‘be enough’ bwej ‘enough’buubuu ‘rub’ bubuı ‘crumb’
With front vowels, there is no change, but the low vowel [a] fronts to [E] and the mid backvowels likewise front, creating a glide+vowel sequence [wV] to retain surface evidence ofunderlying backness. Plural formation in Seenku today can be understood as arising fromthe same principles, assuming that the language has evolved a ban on diphthongs endingin [j] and that glides are not all [w] but retain underlying vowel features.
Looking at Dzuungoo, we also see that the suffix -i becomes non-moraic (a glide)whenever it follows a non-high vowel, with no change in length in the preceding vowel;in other words, only /i/ becomes lengthened on the surface, and all syllables with vowelsother than /u/ have the same number of moras in derived and underived forms. InSeenku, plural formation likewise does not affect the mora count of the singular. Thelength contrast in singular nouns is preserved:
(18) a. kyOO-ba → kyOO-bE ‘sorcerer(s)’
b. ky@baa → ky@bEE ‘orphan(s)’
In (18a), the short vowel of ba (a nominalized form of ‘do’) remains short in the plural,while in (18b), the long vowel of ky@baa remains long in the plural.
Importantly, the vowel length contrast is also maintained for back-vowel stems underdiphthong formation. For example:
(19) a. s‚o → soe ‘horse(s)’
b. g‚OO → g‚OEE ‘field(s)’
Because the diphthong initial round vowel is non-syllabic, having a long vowel as thesecond element as in (19b) does not create a superheavy syllable.
Seenku has regularized this pattern by likewise maintaining mora count with highvowel stems in the plural, unlike in Dzuungoo:
(20) a. bı → bı ‘goat(s)’
b. su → sui ‘antelope(s)’
In (20b), the [u] in the diphthong is non-moraic.
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While comparison with related languages can help us understand the diachronic pathsthat have led to the current situation, Seenku speakers are of course only exposed toinput from the modern language—the synchronic grammar does not necessarily encodethese diachronic properties. In this paper, I will argue that what originated as a pluralsuffix consisting of a full vowel and a full tone has been reinterpreted by Seenku speakersas consisting of floating features only: a vocalic feature [+front] is responsible for thefronting effect while a tonal feature [+raised] accounts for tone raising. Support for thisanalysis can be found in a contrast between the plural and the antipassive, which displayalmost identical vocalic effects except that antipassive suffixation always results in a longvowel:
(21) a. ba˜→ bE
˜E˜‘hit (sth.)/do some hitting’
b. j@gı → j@gıi ‘lay (an egg)/do some laying’
c. k‚oo → k‚oee ‘sing (a song)/sing’
d. gy‚O˜→ gy‚O
˜E˜E˜‘grill (sth.)/do some grilling’
Antipassive morphology leads to the creation of long vowels, while in the plural, originalvowel length is retained. This may be related to a distinction in Dzuungoo pointed out bySolomiac (2014), wherein /Vi/ in nouns becomes [Vj] while /Vi/ becomes [VVj] in verbs,but I argue that the most straightforward synchronic account of the facts in Seenku is toposit a featural affix for the plural and a vocalic suffix for the antipassive. Given the lackof lengthening in the plural, even with high vowels, the learner would have no reason toposit a moraic suffix to account for it.
5 A featural affixation approach
In this section, I demonstrate how featural affixation naturally accounts for the Seenkudata patterns. I show that the data crucially motivate multiple feature affixation,where the plural suffix consists of two floating features: a feature [+front] accounting forthe vocalic changes and a feature [+raised] accounting for the tone raising. I first lay outthe featural representations of [+front] and [+raised] docking, then turn to a constraint-based analysis. I consider various proposals in the literature for the realization of featuralaffixes and conclude that a combination of Max constraints on feature values (Lombardi1998, 2001, Zhang 2000, Kim and Pulleyblank 2004) and Realize-Morpheme (vanOostendorp 2005, Trommer 2012) provides the least stipulative account of the data.
For an alternative proposal based on level ordering, see §6.
5.1 Featural affixation: [+front]
As we saw in §4.1, the overarching vocalic pattern is that plural forms end in a frontvowel. I argue that this output pattern is achieved through the suffixation of a featuralaffix [+front]. In order to illustrate the effects of [+front] on the singular stem, we firstneed to establish the feature system for Seenku vowels. I will be assuming a fully specified
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binary feature system, with high vowels specified as [+ATR] and /a/ as [-ATR], despitethe lack of contrast at these heights.6
(22) Seenku vowel features
[front] [back] [round] [high] [low] [ATR]
i + - - + - +e + - - - - +E + - - - - -a - - - - + -O - + + - - -o - + + - - +u - + + + - +
Henceforth, I will omit the feature [round] as it is redundant with [back].When affixed to a front vowel stem, the plural feature [+front] simply merges with
the [+front] feature of the stem, resulting in no audible change. This result is illustratedin (23) for the stem bı ‘goat’ (ignoring tone for now):
(23) bı → bı ‘goat(s)’
CV ! CV
| |
+front1
-back
+high
-low
+ATR
[+front]PL,2
+front1/2
-back
+high
-low
+ATR
PL
Modified features are boldfaced in the output. The addition of [+front] does not affectany other vocalic feature of the root.
With low-vowel stems, we find a necessary modification triggered by the affixation of[+front]:
(24) ka → kE ‘griot(s)’
CV ! CV
| |
-front
-back
-high
+low
-ATR
[+front]PL
+front
-back
-high
-low
-ATR
PL
Given the lack of low front vowels in Seenku, the feature [+low] is changed to [-low] when[+front] is added. The result is the vowel [E].
6It is also possible to construct an analysis based on privative vocalic features rather than binary ones.Under this approach, all vowels marked as [+] in the following table have the relevant feature present;all features marked as [-] do not. Thus, the vowel /E/ would be simply [front] and /a/ would be simply[low].
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The most complicated case involves back-vowel stems, where diphthongs are createdrather than simply fronting the vowel. As seen in (13) above, diphthongs in Seenku involvea non-syllabic vowel (a glide) followed by a full syllabic vowel; in the matrices below, Iuse the feature [syll] as a stand-in for moraic association. Since [+front] is incompatiblewith both [+back] and [+round] (the former universally, the latter in terms of Seenku’svowel inventory), both of these positive feature values surface only in the glide portion ofthe diphthong; all other features of the stem vowel ([ATR], [high], [nasal], etc.) appearin both portions. This result is shown below:
(25) su → su“
i ‘antelope(s)’
CV1 ! CV1 V1
| | |
+syll
-front
+back
+high
-low
+ATR
[+front]PL
-syll
-front
+back
+high
-low
+ATR
+syll
+front
-back
+high
-low
+ATR
PL
The indices on the CV tier show that V in the singular splits into two V elements onthe surface, the first non-moraic ([-syll] and the latter with the original mora(s) ([+syll]).The original feature specification [+back] surfaces solely on the non-syllabic portion, while[+front] from the plural appears solely on the syllabic portion (triggering a change in [back]to a minus specification). All other vocalic features appear on both. We know that theglide portion carries more features than just [back] (and [round]), since the feature [high]causes the adjacent alveolar fricative to palatalize, and this palatalization is present inboth the singular as well as the plural; conversely, for [-high] stems like /s‚o/ → [soe], nopalatalization takes place.
When the stem vowel is long (associated with two moras), both moras remain withthe second syllabic portion of the vowel, due to Seenku’s ban on adjacent moraic vowels.As mentioned above, the use of [±syllabic] follows directly from the moraic associationsand is thus redundant in this representation, but I retain it in the feature matrices forconsistency.
(26) gO:1 → gO“E:2 ‘field(s)’
µ µ µ µ
CV1 ! CV1 V1
| | |
+syll
-front
+back
-high
-low
-ATR
[+front]PL
-syll
-front
+back
-high
-low
-ATR
+syll
+front
-back
-high
-low
-ATR
PL
The fact that the diphthong-initial element is not associated with a mora allows Seenkuto retain its length contrast in diphthongs, and importantly for the present discussion, indiphthongs created by plural formation.
12
Most vocabulary in Seenku is monosyllabic or sesquisyllabic (Matisoff 1990), meaninga short half syllable (transcribed in this paper with schwa) followed by a full syllable;both monosyllabic and sesquisyllabic words have only one full vowel and are subject tothe same overarching tone melodies, e.g. ba
˜a˜‘balafon’ and ky@baa ‘orphan’, both with a
single /a/ or /a˜/ and both with H-X tone melody. Those few true disyllabic stems (i.e.
those stems with two full vowels) only display a change in the final vowel, hence providingevidence that this feature is a suffix.7 For example:
(27) Plural formation on polysyllabic stemsSingular Pluralko-koo ‘rooster’ ko-koee ‘roosters’j‚oNwa ‘cat’ j‚oNwE ‘cats’m‚aafO ‘gun’ m‚aafOE ‘guns’
The first form in the table is polymorphemic, consisting of the base and a reduplicant.Here, we see that only the base undergoes the fronting effect of the plural. In the secondform in the table, j‚oNwa ‘cat’, only the second vowel /a/ is affected, fronting to [E]. Thelast form is a loanword (originally from Arabic midfa’) with variants in many Mandelanguages; only the final /O/ is affected, becoming the diphthong [OE] in the plural. As wecan thus see, the featural affix is best viewed as a suffix, docking only to the final vowel,rather than affecting the entire stem or morpheme to which it docks.
To summarize, I argue that Seenku speakers are never presented with any evidencethat the plural suffix consists of a full vowel, especially not the reconstructed plural vowel/i/: First, the singular and plural contain the same number of moras, so if the suffix weremoraic, the plural would need to undergo a mora deletion process; this process wouldneed to be specific to the plural, since the nearly homophonous antipassive shown in (21)does add a mora. Second, there is no trace of /i/ other than a fronting of the stem vowel.A featural affix [+front] is a simpler analysis that avoids these pitfalls; for a discussion ofstratal alternatives, see §6.
5.2 Featural affixation: [+raised]
The tonal changes discussed in §4.2 can also be understood in terms of featural affixation.This relies on the assumption that the four levels of tone in Seenku are composed of tonalfeatures. In this analysis, I adopt the featural system of Pulleyblank (1986), adapted fromYip (1980):
(28) Seenku tonal featuresupper - - + +raised - + - +
X L H S
The four tone levels are naturally accounted for using two binary features, [upper] and[raised]. The lowest tone, X, is specified as minus for both features: [-upper, -raised]. TheL tone, derived by plural formation, is [-upper, +raised]. The H tone shows the oppositespecification, [+upper, -raised], while the highest tone S is specified as [+upper, +raised].
7Though see §7 below for an idiosyncratic case in which both vowels are raised.
13
The tone raising in plural formation can be understood as the affixation of [+raised].Added to X tone, this derives L; added to H, it derives S; added to S, there is no audiblechange, since the tone is already specified as [+raised]. As we can see, this lends supportto the analysis that surface H-X nouns are simply H underlyingly, since feature [+raised]affects the H and not the X. Whence, then, the X tone? It may be tempting to proposethat the falling contour is simply the phonetic realization of H, but the existence of levelH-toned pronouns, numerals, and verbs shows that this cannot be the case.8 Instead, wecould take X to instantiate singular, in contrast to the [+raised] instantiating the plural.While this would work for both X-toned singular nouns and H-toned singular nouns,we would then expect to see underlyingly S-toned singular nouns surface as S-X, anunattested result (though a licit contour tone in the language). The most straightforwardexplanation seems to lie in morphologically-conditioned tonotactics (cf. Shih and Inkelas2016): H is not allowed in word-final position in nouns. As a repair for the tonotacticviolation, X is epenthesized. Note that plural formation crucially applies to the underlyingH-toned root, not to the result of tonotactic repairs, lending support to the order ofMorphology before Phonology (see also McPherson 2016).
As we saw in the last subsection, the vocalic plural feature is a suffix in Seenku; thesame holds true of the tonal feature as well. Thus, only the final tone of the stem is raisedin the plural. Cases with audible tonal changes include:
(29) Singular Plural Glossa. H-H(-X) ko-koo H-S ko-koee ‘rooster(s)’
b. X-H(-X) d‚aa X-S d‚EE ‘hanging basket holder(s)’k‚unu k‚unui ‘stone(s)’
We can see why in these forms the final X tone of H-X singular forms must not be presentin the base of affixation: [+raised] exerts its influence on [+upper, -raised] H rather thanon X. This is consistent with X being phonotactically motivated, epenthesized as a lastresort if the morphophonology offers no alternative repair.
The featural affixation responsible for the first form in (29b) can be schematized as in(30):9
8Further evidence against this position comes from two sources. First, the Sembla have a surrogatelanguage system played on the xylophone that encodes tone. For the purposes of the surrogate system,musicians have very good awareness of the tonality of the language, and in working with them, I havebeen told explicitly that in a word like bı ‘goat’, there are two tones; the equivalent of H and X are thenplayed on the xylophone to represent such words. Second, certain sequences of words in a close syntacticrelationship (inalienable possession, some O+V sequences) form what I call “tonal compounds”, in whichthe final tone of the first word spreads onto the second, replacing its lexical tone (McPherson 2016).When a H-toned word like bı ‘goat’ is in initial position in a tonal compound, it spreads X and not H tothe following word (e.g. bı b‚a ‘hit a goat’, cf. /b˝a/ ‘hit’).
9I set aside the question of feature geometry for tones here and simply show both tone features in afeature matrix associated to a tonal node T, which itself interfaces with segmental material. Nothing inthe analysis hinges crucially on this fact.
14
(30) Tonal plural suffixation for bitonal d‚aa ‘hanging basket holder(s)’
daː ! dɛː
T T T T
| | | |
-upper
-raised
+upper
-raised [+raised]PL
-upper
-raised
+upper
+raised PL
The initial L tone ([-upper, -raised]) is not affected by the affixation of [+upper].In other cases, we can tell that the tonal feature [+raised] is a suffix from the fact that
a final S tone blocks it from affecting X or H tones earlier in the stem:
(31) Singular Plural Glossj‚oNwa j‚oNwE ‘cat(s)’d‚o-do d‚o-doe ‘thigh(s)’
Given the fact that the tonal suffix affects only the final tone, it also provides us withinsight into the tonal structure of sesquisyllabic words in which both the initial ‘halfsyllable’ and the final full syllable are realized with tone. In particular, we see that thesesesquisyllabic stems must carry a single underlying tone linked to both the reduced andfull vowel, since both are affected in the plural. In (32), tone is marked on both the halfsyllable and the full syllable to illustrate the effects of plural formation:
(32) a. j‚@g‚e → j@ge ‘dog(s)’n‚@g‚ı → n@gı ‘cow(s)’
b. t@gE → t@gE ‘chicken(s)’ky@baa → ky@bEE ‘orphan(s)’
The following schematizes this result for the first form ‘dogs’ (32a):
(33) Tonal plural suffixation for sesquisyllabic j‚@g‚e ‘dog’
jəge ! jəge
T T
| |
-upper
-raised [+raised]PL
-upper
+raised PL
The [+raised] featural affix docks to the tonal node and overwrites the underlying [-raised]specification. In the transcription system used elsewhere in this paper, the tone melodyis marked just once on sesquisyllabic words (on the full vowel) to represent the fact thatthe half syllable is not independently assigned tone.
5.3 An OT account of Seenku featural affixation
From an OT perspective, plural forms in Seenku can be understood as optimally satisfyinga number of morphological and/or phonological constraints on the preservation of featuresand phonotactic constraints on featural cooccurrence. Foremost in an analysis of featural
15
affixation, we need a constraint or constraints that militate the docking and realization ofthe floating feature at the possible expense of featural specifications in the root. Since thefloating features are, in this case, the instantiation of a morpheme rather than phonologicalmaterial belonging to the root, this increases the number of possible analyses.
Trommer (2012) highlights four approaches to the problem, including Max constraintsfor feature values (Lombardi 1998, 2001, Zhang 2000, Kim and Pulleyblank 2004), marked-ness constraints favoring the specification of the floating feature rather than the dockingsite’s specification, a constraint Max-Flt (Wolf 2005, 2007) penalizing the deletion ofunderlyingly unassociated features, and Realize-Morpheme (van Oostendorp 2005)requiring morphemes to be phonologically realized. The first two approaches depend onphonological consistency or naturalness, which systems of featural affixation do not al-ways display. For instance, in Nuer, both [+continuant] and [-continuant] are attested asfeatural affixes, showing that either ranking Max[-cont] ≫ Max[+cont] or Max[+cont]≫ Max[-cont] will run into trouble (Wolf 2005). Similarly, using markedness constraintsto favor the floating feature presupposes that the floating feature is less marked than theunderlying specification, a fact which may not hold true of the phonology as a whole. Interms of the morphological options, Wolf (2005, 2007) argues that Realize-Morphemeis not powerful enough, since cases of multiple feature affixation would need only a singlefeature to be realized in order to satisfy the constraint. Trommer (2012) counters thisargument by showing that the putative cases of multiple feature affixation are in factdecomposable into multiple morphemes, each subject to Realize-Morpheme.
Let us first consider the morphological explanations in the context of Seenku pluralformation. We have seen that this is a case of multiple feature affixation, involving thevocalic feature [+front] in addition to the tonal feature [+raised]. Unlike the cases pre-sented in Trommer (2012), there is no immediately apparent way to break the morphemeplural into smaller morphosyntactic pieces, each realized by one of the features. Thus,as argued by Wolf (2005, 2007), the Realize-Morpheme approach would need to seethe docking of only one of the features in order to be satisfied. Consider first the definitionof Realize-Morpheme followed by an illustrative tableau for the plural form kE ‘griots’,differing both tonally and vocalically from the singular ka:
(34) Realize-Morpheme: For every morpheme in the input, some phonological el-ement should be present in the output (van Oostendorp 2005)
Tonal features are shown in the top matrix and vocalic features in the bottom. Aswe can see, candidates (a-c) all satisfy Realize-Morpheme, since in every case, eitherone or both of the features [+front] and [+raised] is present to realize the plural. Thus,the winning candidate will be the one that realizes the plural with the fewest faithful-ness violations, in this case candidate (a), which realizes only the tone feature; realizingthe vocalic feature results in violations of both Ident(front) and Ident(low) (since thevowel inventory does not contain [æ]), and the attested surface form, which realizes bothfeatures, incurs violations of all faithfulness constraints. Under this approach, candidate(c) is harmonically bounded and will never be selected as optimal.
Situations like this led Wolf (2005, 2007) to argue for a different approach to featuralaffixation, namely the constraint Max-Flt:
(35) Max-Flt: All autosegments that are floating in the input have output corre-
16
+upper
-raised
|
ká
+front
+raised PL
|
-front
+low R
EA
L-M
OR
PH
IDE
NT(f
ront)
IDE
NT(r
aise
d)
IDE
NT(l
ow
)
!a.
+upper
+raised PL
|
ka
|
-front
+low PL
*
b.
+upper
-raised
|
kɛ
|
+front
-low PL
*
*!
☹ c.
+upper
+raised PL
|
kɛ
|
+front
-low PL
*
*!
*
d.
+upper
-raised
|
ká
|
-front
+low
*!
Table 1: Realize-Morpheme approach to plural formation
17
+upper
-raised
|
ká
+front
+raised PL
|
-front
+low M
AX
-FL
T
IDE
NT(f
ront)
IDE
NT(r
aise
d)
IDE
NT(l
ow
)
a.
+upper
+raised PL
|
ka
|
-front
+low PL
*!
*
b.
+upper
-raised
|
kɛ
|
+front
-low PL
*!
*
*
! c.
+upper
+raised PL
|
kɛ
|
+front
-low PL
*
*
*
d.
+upper
-raised
|
ká
|
-front
+low
*!*
Table 2: Max-Flt approach to plural formation
spondents (Wolf 2007)
This constraint gives preference to floating features over underlyingly associated features.No matter how many floating features a morpheme consists of, these features will be givenpreferential treatment by the grammar, regardless of their feature specification (cf. thephonological approaches below). The tableau in Table2 illustrates this approach.
As this tableau shows, if Max-Flt dominates phonological constraints on featurerealization (shown here with Ident, though the principles would be the same with Maxconstraints), the floating features will always be realized.
If morphological constraints on feature realization were the only force at play, thenSeenku would provide a clear argument for Max-Flt over Realize-Morpheme, sinceonly the former can account for multiple feature affixation. However, if we take phono-logical approaches in account, the picture changes.10
With no reference to morphological structure, we could simply propose thatMax[+front]≫ Max[-front], meaning that the floating [+front] feature will be preserved in the output
10Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this combination of approaches.
18
bi
|
+upper
-raised [+raised]PL
MA
X[+
rais
ed]
MA
X[-
rais
ed]
! a. bi
|
+upper
+raised PL
*
b. bi
|
+upper
-raised
*!
Table 3: Max[+raised] ≫ Max[-raised] forbı ‘goats’
at the expense of any [-front] in the stem. A look at the morphophonological system ofSeenku as a whole shows no contradictory evidence, that is, cases where [-front] is pre-served at the expense of [+front], which would seem to lend support to this analysis. Butif we look at the other feature of the plural, [+raised], the story is not so straightforward.The ranking Max[+raised] ≫ Max[-raised] would account for the plural, but anothercase of featural affixation involves the feature [-raised], which encodes the perfective. Thisfeature lowers S verbs to H, while leaving H and X verbs unchanged:
(36) Perfective formation with [-raised]UR Perfective Gloss
/S/ /ba˜/ ba
˜‘hit’
/dzı˜/ dzı
˜‘put’
/j@gı/ j@gı ‘ground’
/H/ /tsı˜/ tsı
˜‘cut’
/sOO/ sOO ‘sold’/d@gE/ d@gE ‘cooked’
/X/ /s‚a˜/ s‚a
˜‘bought’
/f‚O/ f‚O ‘uprooted’/t@g‚ı/ t@g‚ı ‘built’
While Max[+raised] would need to outrank Max[-raised] to preserve the featural affix ofthe plural, the reverse would need to be true for the perfective. This situation is illustratedin the following mini tableaux in Tables (36) and (36):
In the case of the plural in (36a), the ranking selects the correct winner, in which thefloating feature [+raised] replaces the underlying [-raised] specification on the root. Thissame ranking in (36b), however, incorrectly selects candidate (a), in which the perfectiveaffix [-raised] is deleted. A markedness approach would be problematic for the samereason: [+raised] cannot be less marked in one case (the plural) and more marked inanother (the perfective).
However, though perfective verbs are realis in Seenku and realis correlates with other
19
bã
|
+upper
+raised [-raised]PFV
MA
X[+
rais
ed]
MA
X[-
rais
ed]
!a. bã
|
+upper
+raised
*
☹ b. bã
|
+upper
-raised
*!
Table 4: Max[+raised] ≫ Max[-raised] forba˜‘hitpfv’
bi
|
+upper
-raised [+raised]PL
RE
AL-M
OR
PH
MA
X[+
rais
ed]
MA
X[-
rais
ed]
! a. bi
|
+upper
+raised PL
*
b. bi
|
+upper
-raised
*!
*
Table 5: Real-Morph ≫ Max[+raised] ≫ Max[-raised] for bı ‘goats’
differences in form (e.g. no tonal interaction with the object, idiosyncratic diphthon-gization of the stem vowel, McPherson forthcoming), tone lowering driven by [-raised]is the only marking of the perfective itself. As such, a combination of Max[+raised]≫ Max[-raised] and Realize-Morpheme is able to account for these data patterns; ifRealize-Morpheme dominates both Max constraints, the more marked feature can beforced to dock in order to realize the perfective; see the tableaux in Tables 5 and 6.
Even though the ranking of phonological constraints in Table 6 penalizes the lossof [+raised], deleting [-raised] of the perfective violates more highly ranked Realize-Morpheme.
We are thus left with two analyses that can capture the Seenku data patterns: Max-Flt and the combination of Realize-Morpheme with Max constraints for featuralspecifications. To unequivocally motivate the former, we would need to find a case likeSeenku where different morphological processes require different rankings of Max[±F]and both processes involve more than one marking (e.g. more than one feature, a featureand a segmental affix, etc.). In the present case, I will argue in favor the latter approach,since there is independent need in Seenku for Max[±F] constraints.
Evidence comes from back vowel stems, which form diphthongs in the plural. This
20
bã
|
+upper
+raised [-raised]PFV
RE
AL-M
OR
PH
MA
X[+
rais
ed]
MA
X[-
rais
ed]
a. bã
|
+upper
+raised
*!
*
!b. bã
|
+upper
-raised
*
Table 6: Real-Morph ≫ Max[+raised] ≫ Max[-raised] for ba˜‘hitpfv’
behavior is accounted for if we assume a highly rankedMax[+back] constraint, motivatingthe creation of a back glide to preserve this feature specification. The tableau in Table7, focusing only on vocalic changes, demonstrates the role of this constraint while alsoaddressing the preservation of vowel length in the plural. As before, [+long] stands in asshorthand for a vowel with two moras.
I assume undominated Realize-Morpheme, which rules out candidate (b), thoughMax[+front] in this case would do the same thing. Max[+back] is ranked in the samestratum as Max[+front], meaning [+back] likewise cannot be deleted (as in candidate c);since these two featural specifications are at odds with one another, the vowel must splitinto a diphthong where each element carries one of the features. Diphthongs in Seenkuinvolve a non-moraic initial vowel (indicated above with [-syll]), which I motivate with theconstraint *VV (in which both Vs are moraic). This constraint rules out candidates (d)and (e), where the diphthong-initial element is a syllabic (i.e. moraic) vowel. Candidate(e) is additionally penalized since the second element retains both of its moras (markedhere as [+long]), resulting in a trimoraic vowel—this involves the addition of one mora tothe underlying form, violating Dep(µ). The fact that the initial element of the diphthongretains all of the features of the stem vowel raher than being a simple glide like [w] isexplained by the fact that the underlying vowel splits into two exponents, in violation ofIntegrity, rather than epenthesizing a glide or a vowel to carry the feature [+back].
Finally, let us consider how this approach can distinguish between the behavior ofthe plural and the antipassive. Recall from (21) that the antipassive always results in along vowel, while the plural has been shown to maintain the length of the stem. Thisdistinction is easily accounted for if we assume that the antipassive suffix in Seenku is a fullvowel, contributing a mora to the input. Assuming a highly ranked constraint Max(µ),this same constraint-based analysis predicts the right results for the antipassive as well.In the tableau in Table 8, I have omitted candidates that violate Realize-Morphemeas well as any features not directly involved in the realization of the antipassive (here,[nasal], [back]):11
By virtue of being a vowel, the antipassive suffix /-i/ contributes a mora. There-
11I show the antipassive suffix as -i, but it could equally well be a front vowel underspecified for height.It cannot be a mid vowel, since its effect is to lengthen high vowels rather than creating a high-middiphthong, which are otherwise licit in the language.
21
gɔː1
|
-front
+back
+long [+front]PL
RE
AL-M
OR
PH
MA
X[+
fro
nt]
MA
X[+
bac
k]
*V
V
DE
P(µ
)
INT
EG
RIT
Y
DE
P[-
bac
k]
MA
X[-
fro
nt]
!a. gɔ1 ɛː1
| |
-syll
-front
+back
-long
+front
-back
+long PL
*
*
b. gɔː1
|
-front
+back
+long
*!
*
c. gɛː1
|
+front
-back
+long PL
*!
*
*
d. gɔ1 ɛ1
| |
-front
+back
-long
+front
-back
-long PL
*!
*
*
e. gɔ1 ɛː1
| |
-front
+back
-long
+front
-back
+long PL
*!
*
*
*
Table 7: /gOO/ → [gO“EE] ‘wood(s)’
22
ba1 i2
| |
-high
+low
-front
-long
+high
-low
+front
-long
ANTIP
MA
X(µ
)
MA
X[+
fro
nt]
MA
X[-
hig
h]
*V
V
UN
IFO
RM
ITY
MA
X[+
hig
h]
MA
X[+
low
]
MA
X[-
fro
nt]
!a. bɛɛ1,2
|
-high
-low
+front
+long
ANTIP
*
*
*
*
b. bɛ1,2
|
-high
-low
+front
-long
ANTIP
*!
*
*
*
*
c. baa1,2 |
-high
+low
-front
+long
ANTIP
*!
*
*
d. bii1,2
|
+high
-low
+front
+long
ANTIP
*!
*
*
*
e. ba1 i2
| |
-high
+low
-front
-long
+high
-low
+front
-long
ANTIP
*!
Table 8: /ba˜-i/ → [bE
˜E˜] ‘do some hitting’
23
fore, any output candidate (here, candidate b) with only a single mora is in violation ofMax(µ). Candidate (e), with its sequence of two vowels, violates *VV and is likewiseruled out. In this analysis, the surface form bE
˜E˜is the result of vowel coalescence, which
violates low-ranked Uniformity. Candidates (c) and (d) are also the result of vowelcoalescence, but candidate (c) is ruled out by violating Max[+front] while candidate (d)is ruled out by violating Max[-high]. These rankings ensure that the output form main-tains features of both the stem and the suffix and are consistent with the realization ofthe plural. Max(µ) ensures that the output will always have a long vowel when the suffixcontributes a mora.12
In sum, this section has shown that Seenku multiple feature affixation does not neces-sitate Wolf’s (2007) Max-Flt constraint, but rather can be accounted for with Realize-Morpheme (van Oostendorp 2005, Trommer 2012) combined with Max[±F]. The dif-ference between the plural and antipassive is one of underying representations—featuralvs. vocalic.
6 A stratal approach
Though the data are well accounted for in a featural affixation analysis, this is not the onlyconceivable approach. A reviewer suggests a reanalysis in which the difference betweenthe plural and the antipassive is not one of representations but one of level in a stratalphonology approach (Kiparsky 1982, 2000; Bermudez-Otero forthcoming). In other words,the suffix is a full vowel in both cases (with a full tone in the case of the plural), butdepending upon the level at which it is attached, it will either fully coalesce, preservinglength distinctions in the stem, or retain its mora, resulting in a long vowel. I will verybriefly sketch out this alternative here, showing that while it may work for the vocalicchanges, the tonal changes do not fall out as easily. For further difficulties with thisapproach, see §7.
Setting tone aside for the moment, we could posit that the plural and antipassivesuffix in Seenku are not so far removed from their diachronic origins, both having theunderlying form /-i/. Since falling sonority diphthongs are not permitted in the language,the grammar needs to find another way to realize this suffix. In both cases, the optimalsolution is as seen in the tableau in Table 8: coalescence with the stem vowel, preservingthe feature [+front] of the suffix; if the stem is [+back], this feature is preserved throughdiphthong formation. The difference between the realization of the two is that in theplural, Max(µ) is ranked below an indexed constraint requiring the stem vowel to havethe same number of moras in the input and the output (e.g. Ident-IO[long]stem), whereasthis ranking is reversed for the antipassive. These outcomes are illustrated in the minitableaux in Tables 9 and 10.
I have left out candidates and constraints exploring the realization of the coalescedvowel, assuming that it follows from the ranking of faithfulness constraints on featureslaid out in the last section. These tableaux show that at any level of the grammar, Seenkupenalizes VV sequences but also disprefers vowel deletion as a repair strategy.13 Thus,
12Note that the output of the antipassive is always long and never superlong. A higher ranked constraintagainst superlong vowels can force the deletion of a mora.
13Realize-Morpheme could also be invoked to account for these data, since at the post-lexical level,vowel deletion is attested. This is either due to the demotion of Max(V) at the post-lexical level or to
24
/ka1 -i2/ *V
V
MA
X(V
)
IDE
NT-
IO(l
ong) s
tem
MA
X(µ
)
UN
IFO
RM
ITY
a. kɛɛ1,2
*!
*
! b. kɛ1,2
*
*
c. ka1 *!
*
d. ki2
*!
*
e. ka1i2
*!
Table 9: Plural formation: Stem length preservation
/ba1 -i2/ *V
V
MA
X(V
)
MA
X(µ
)
IDE
NT-
IO(l
on
g) s
tem
UN
IFO
RM
ITY
!a. bɛɛ1,2
*
*
b. bɛ1,2
*!
*
c. ba1 *!
*
d. bi2
*!
*
e. ba1i2
*!
Table 10: Antipassive formation: Stem length neutralization
25
the two vowels coalesce (in violation of low-ranked Uniformity), but in the case of theplural (36a), an indexed faithfulness constraint on stem vowel length outranks Max(µ),which results in candidate (b) being chosen as winner; in the level of the grammar atwhich the antipassive is added, this ranking is reversed, and candidate (a) is chosen aswinner.
If the stratal account is meant to completely replace featural affixation, then we wouldalso require a level of phonology at which tones coalesce rather than forming contour tones,which are well attested in the language. For the plural, the natural choice to drive toneraising would be S: coalescence of X and S would create L, coalescence of H and S wouldcreate S, and coalescence of S and S would remain S. However, such coalescence could notbe driven by a complete ban on contour tones, since contour tones (including those endingin S) exist in nouns at the level of the lexicon: L-S kpaan ‘head of a group of herders’,d@gOO ‘place’; X-H(-X) d‚aa ‘basket hanger’, k‚@nu ‘stone’. Contour tones like these tend toshare the same register feature, thus L-S (both [+raised]) and not X-S. Raising singularX to plural L in the presence of a S-toned suffix would be a step towards sharing thisfeature, but in order for a coalescence analysis to work, we would need constraints thatprevent new contour tones from forming while protecting underlying ones.
Even assuming we could find the right constraints to enforce this outcome in the plural,we run into issues of level ordering when we combine vocalic and tonal data and look at thegrammar as a whole. The following table classifies morphological processes in Seenku interms of tone (coalescence=level change vs. concatenation=contour tones) and segmentalproperties (coalescence=stem length preservation vs. concatenation=lengthening). Inparentheses after each process is the syntactic category affected by the morphologicalprocess:
(37) Classification of morphological processes in Seenku
Coalescence ConcatenationTone plural (noun) genitive (noun)
perfective (verb) perfect (verb)realis (verb) past (noun)
progressive (verb)Vowel plural (noun) antipassive (verb)
realis (verb) genitive (noun)past (noun)
Space does not permit in-depth treatment of each morphological process here. I willsimply highlight a couple of potential issues that arise in level ordering. At first glance, itlooks promising that processes that involve lengthening a vowel (e.g. past or the genitive)also involve tonal concatenation. An example is the past tense, which is marked eitherby an enclitic lE on the subject or by lengthening the final vowel of the subject, with Son the second mora:
(38) a. bı=lEgoat=pst
b‚EEpig
ba˜hit.real.pfv
‘A goat hit a pig.’
the fact that in those cases of vowel deletion, a full morpheme is never being lost.
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b. bııgoat.pst
b‚EEpig
ba˜hit.real.pfv
‘A goat hit a pig.’
In (38a), the S-toned enclitic suffices to block X tone epenthesis on the singular H-tonednoun. In (38b) we see the same noun with a H-S contour and a lengthened vowel. Thislengthening and S concatenation must occur after plural formation, since it is the tonal(and presumably vocalic) output of plural formation to which the past tense applies. Thisis shown by contrasting a singular and plural with past tense marking in (39):
(39) a. b‚EEpig.pst
bıgoat
Ťba˜hit.real.pfv
‘A pig hit a goat.’
b. bEEpig.pl.pst
bıgoat.pl
ba˜hit.real.pfv
‘Pigs hit goats.’
In (39a), the contour tone is X-S (lexically disallowed), created by concatenating the S ofthe past with the singular X-toned noun. In (39b), it is a L-S contour, created from theresulting L of plural formation.
If we assume that levels preserving phonological shape of the stem, through lengthpreservation and barring the creation of new contour tones as in the plural, apply beforethose that simply concatenate material, then we might expect that the antipassive occursin a later level since stem length is not preserved. However, since the antipassive detran-sitivitizes the verb, it must occur before realis marking, which is sensitive to transitivity.In featural terms, transitive verbs are marked with [+raised], which neutralizes /H/ and/S/ to [S] (while raising X to L), while intransitive verbs are marked with [-raised], whichneutralizes /H/ and /S/ to [H]. These tone patterns also apply to antipassive verbs, evenwhen the stem is lexically transitive:
(40) a. /ba˜/ → [bE
˜E˜] ‘do some hitting’
If realis tone assignment occurred before the antipassive is added, then we would expectthe output to remain S. Instead, the antipassive detransitivizes the verb ‘hit’ and [-raised]is applied. But concatenative tone patterns, like the progressive, likewise apply after theantipassive, such as the progressive, which is also sensitive to transitivity, adding S totransitive verbs and X to intransitive:
(41) sOsky
nsı˜be
bE˜E˜hit.antip
n‚Ein
‘It is raining.’ (Lit. the sky is hitting)
In the progressive, S is neutralized to H to mark realis and an X is added to mark theprogressive, yielding a H-X contour.
Thus, we cannot simply say that the first level of grammar is coalescing followed by alevel of concatenation. We would need a level ordering like the following:
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1. Antipassive
2. Plural, Realis, Perfective
3. Genitive, Perfect, Past, Progressive
In other words, the grammar would allow the lengthening of stem vowels at Level 1,disallow it at Level 2, then allow it again at Level 3; this is problematic if we considerKiparsky’s (1984) Strong Domain Hypothesis, that at lower levels of the grammar rulesmay be turned off but no new rules can be added.14
To summarize, we are left with two possible solutions: the featural affixation approach,which relies on distinctions in underlying representations but requires only a single simplegrammar, and the stratal approach, which simplifies underlying represenations but resultsin a complicated grammar. However, it is unclear how well even this complicated grammarwould work, given the problems laid out here: the presence of lexical contour tones ata level in which the formation of contour tones is banned and the fact that the levelswould need a process to turn off and turn back on again, as would be necessary for morapreservation.15
7 Incorporating nasal stems
Before concluding, I turn to one final class of nouns to serve as a testing ground for theanalyses laid out above: nasal stems. This class has two subclasses: nouns with a finalfloating nasal feature and nouns with a nasal coda. Plural formation differs by class, andboth patterns are challenging for the theories put forth in this paper. I will sketch outpotential solutions below and show that featural affixation poses fewer analytical problemsthan the stratal approach, though neither account is without stipulation.
First, the floating nasal class is so-called due to the fact that in isolation, the singularnoun is pronounced with an oral vowel; in a phrase, it triggers nasalization of initial sono-rants and prenasalization of initial stops on the following word (42b). The correspondingplural of these nouns contains a nasal vowel and has no effect on the following word (42c):
(42) a. ka‘hut’
b. ka mb@le‘big hut’
14With a more complicated grammatical model, we may be able to get around the antipassive in its ownearly level. We could posit that the antipassive suffix is in fact a long vowel -ii, and thus to keep a shortstem short, two moras would need to be deleted. With weighted constraints, counting up cumulativitycould rule out candidates with Max(µ) violated twice while allowing candidates with a single moradeleted.
15As I have argued elsewhere (McPherson 2016), other data patterns in Seenku point to the need notfor phonological cyclicity, as put forth here, but for systemic cyclicity, in which syntactic structure isspelled out in phases to receive morphological and phonological form. Phonological cyclicity predicts thewrong results for these data. While it possible that both forms of cyclicity are independently needed,this would result in a highly complex set of grammatical computations for each phrase or utterance.
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c. kE˜
bu-b@le16
‘big hut’
As (42c) shows, nasal vowels do not trigger prenasalization of the following consonant;this only occurs from the docking of floating nasal features.
We can compare these forms with a minimal pair with no floating nasal:
(43) a. ka‘griot’
b. ka b@le‘big griot’
c. kE bu-b@le‘big griots’
The following table gives examples of singular and plural forms of stems with floatingnasals (setting aside, for now, [+ATR] stems):17
(44) Plural formation on floating nasal stemsSingular Plural Glosska kE
˜‘hut(s)’
da dE˜
‘wall(s)’sa sE
˜‘rabbit(s)’
s‚Onsa s‚OnsE˜
‘enclosure(s)’kyE kyE
˜‘breast(s)’
dO dO˜E˜
‘shoulder(s)’k‚O˜
kO˜E˜
‘head(s)’nu
˜nu
˜i˜
‘wound(s)’
Floating nasals of this sort may be a feature of the Samogo subfamily as a whole, asthey are equally attested in the two other languages for which descriptions are available,Dzuungoo (Solomiac 2014) and Jowulu (Djilla et al. 2004).
Seenku also contains a subclass of nasal stems with a nasal coda in the singular.Interestingly, there is no trace of the nasal coda in the plural. Examples of these wordswith the corresponding plurals are given in (45):18
16Plural adjectives are marked by reduplication, see McPherson (forthcoming,b).17As the last two examples show, underlyingly nasal vowels can also carry a floating nasal, which
nasalizes the following segment in the singular but not the plural. Complicating the analysis of nasalstems is a great deal of interspeaker variation with regards to the floating nasal. For some speakers,there is no trace of it in isolation, as shown in the following table, while others pronounce these wordswith a nasal coda. They differ from the nasal coda stems in their phrasal behavior (nasalizing followingsonorants) and their plural forms (with nasalized vowels). This variation is a focus of ongoing research.
18The realization of the nasal coda is predictable: a palatal nasal after front vowels, an alveolar or velarnasal after the low vowel, and a velar nasal after back vowels. This table also shows an idiosyncratic casein which the fronting effects of the plural are seen on both /a/ vowels in k‚aNaan ‘cage’; a small handful ofseemingly polymorphemic but opaque forms like this show multiple loci of fronting; all involve the initial
29
(45) Singular stems with nasal codas and their pluralsSingular Plural Glossp‚E
˜E˜ñ p‚E
˜E˜
‘donkey(s)’kpaan kpEE ‘head herder(s)’k‚aNaan k‚ENEE ‘cage(s)’b‚OON b‚OEE ‘bag(s)’kpooN kpee ‘chair(s)’(mo) kyueñ (mo) kyue ‘(my) elbow(s)’
In every case, a singular ending in a nasal coda has a corresponding plural with a finalopen syllable. If the singular stem has a nasalized vowel, the vowel of the plural is alsonasalized; otherwise, the plural vowel is oral. In a phrase, the nasal coda will assimilatein place of articulation to the following consonant, but unlike a floating nasal (shown in(46c) for comparison), it will not nasalize a sonorant:
(46) a. mo1sg.emph
Ťnaprosp
b‚OOnbag
sabuy.irreal
‘I will buy a bag.’
b. s‚O-bE-sabeautiful-nom-thing
l‚Esubord
b‚OONbag
lErel
n‚Ein
‘the bag in which there is an important thing’
c. sarabbit
n‚Esubord
nyu˜
i˜honey
nErel
jıosee.real.pfv
‘the honey that the rabbit found’
In (46a), the final velar nasal on ‘bag’ becomes alveolar before /s/. In (46b), however,the relative marker lE does not nasalize, which we expect after floating nasals, as shownin (46c).
The behavior we must account for is that for floating nasal stems, the floating nasalfeature docks to the following word or morpheme in the singular but to the vowel of thestem itself in the plural. For nasal coda stems, we must account for the fact that thenasal is present in the singular and absent in the plural. Taking first the behavior ofthe floating nasal in the singular, it is a pattern cross-linguistically that floating elementsavoid docking to the morpheme that introduces them. Wolf (2007) proposes a constraintto account for this, NoTautoMorphemicDocking, or NoTauMorDoc:
(47) NoTautoMorphemicDocking (NoTauMorDoc): Floating autosegmentscannot dock onto bearing units that are exponents of the same morpheme (Wolf2007)
This constraint captures the behavior of singular stems with a floating nasal, as shown inthe tableau in Table 11:
The optimal candidate is candidate (a), which docks the noun’s floating nasal ontothe following adjective. Candidate (b), which docks the nasal to the noun itself, violates
vowel /a/.
30
/sâ[+nas] bəlě/ NOTAUMORDOC MAX[+nas]
!a. sâ mbəlě
b. sâ bəlě *!
c. sâ bəlě *!
Table 11: Docking of [+nasal] on the following word in ‘big rabbit’
/sâ[+nas]/ DEP(C) NOTAUMORDOC MAX[+nas]
!a. sâ *
b. sâ *!
c. sân *! (*)
Table 12: Deletion of [+nasal] in isolation in ‘rabbit’
NoTauMorDoc, while candidate (c) which deletes the nasal, violates the faithfulnessconstraint Max[+nas]. Note that we have no need for Realize-Morpheme in thistableau, since the nasal feature does not itself instatiate a morpheme; rather, it is part ofthe noun ‘rabbit’.
The ranking NoTauMorDoc ≫Max[+nas] is motivated by the behavior of singularstems pronounced in isolation, when there is no morpheme following that would allow fornon-tautomorphemic docking. In this case, the floating nasal simply deletes. This resultis shown in the tableau in Table 12.
Candidate (b) is once more ruled out by a violation of NoTauMorDoc. Candidate(c) realizes the floating nasal on an epenthesized consonant, which violates Dep(C). If wedo not consider this epenthesized consonant as part of the same morpheme as the stem,then the variable behavior of floating feature realization in isolation could be viewedas variable ranking of Dep(C) with respect to Max[+nas]. Assuming, however, thatDep(C) outranks Max[+nas], then the optimal candidate is candidate (a), which simplydeletes the floating nasal feature.
Nothing special need be said about nasal coda stems in the singular; nasals are theonly possible coda consonant in Seenku, rare though they may be, and the forms surfacefaithfully in both isolation and phrasal contexts.
As we have seen, the floating feature [+nasal] never creates a nasalized vowel onthe stem in the singular. In the plural, however, this is the only attested outcome; thefloating nasal feature is not allowed to dock on the following word in the plural. Thestratal account seems to provide a natural explanation by adding a vowel suffix to whichthe nasal can dock before coalescing with the stem:
(48) sa[+nas] -ı → sa-ı˜→ sE
˜
However, other morphological processes show us that the addition of an extra mora doesnot necessarily mean the nasal will dock. As we saw in (38) and (39) above, past tenseinflection on the subject adds a S-toned mora. If we assume that a moraic suffix providesa docking site for the floating nasal, we would expect the vowel of the past tense subjectto be nasalized, but instead, the floating nasal docks to the following word, the usualbehavior for a singular noun. The examples in (49) show the past tense first with theovert clitic (a) and then with S-toned lengthening (b):
31
(49) a. sa=nErabbit=pst
bu˜grass
Nm‚aeat.real.pfv
‘The rabbit ate grass.’
b. saarabbit.pst
mbu˜grass
Nm‚aeat.real.pfv
‘The rabbit ate grass.’
In (49a), the floating nasal on ‘rabbit’ nasalizes the initial /l/ of the past tense clitic,turning it into [n]. In (49b), we see the S-toned mora of the past tense suffixed to thesubject, lengthening the vowel and creating a H-S contour, but the vowel is not nasalized.Instead, the floating nasal docks to the following object, creating a prenasalized stop [mb].The same pattern is found in the genitive.
There are at least two ways to deal with the discrepancy between plural formation andmorphological processes that lengthen the vowel. First, if we wish to defend the stratalanalysis, we could assume that the floating nasal must dock to a slot on the segmentalskeletal tier and not simply a mora. Thus, the suffix -i has as part of its representation aV that is associated with a mora, and the nasal docks to this V; the past, on the otherhand, is simply a mora and thus lacks the V. Given NoTauMorDoc, the floating nasaldoes not dock to the V associated with the stem and instead docks to the next availablesegmental slot to its right, which belongs to the next word.
On the other hand, if we wish to maintain the featural analysis argued for throughoutthis paper, a different solution is required. We could propose differing alignment require-ments for the plural and the past, whereby the plural is a true suffix, demanding total rightalignment in the word, whereas the past and genitive are infixes, requiring only alignmentto the final vowel of the stem; in the majority of cases, the two alignment requirementswould be equivalent, since Seenku vocabulary consists almost entirely of open syllables,barring the nasal cases. When the featural plural suffix is added, no material belongingto the stem can be further right, meaning the floating nasal feature cannot follow it.19 Aswe saw in 12 above, though, the ranking NoTauMorDoc ≫ Max[+nas] should triggerdeletion of the nasal feature in the plural, but this does not happen. I propose that byvirtue of docking the plural features to the vowel of the stem, that vowel can be treatedas the exponent of another morpheme, and hence the floating nasal is allowed to dock.This requires reformulation of NoTauMorDoc, as shown in (50):
(50) NoTautoMorphemicDocking (NoTauMorDoc), revised: Floating autoseg-ments cannot dock onto bearing units that are exponents of only the same mor-pheme
This modification is empirically testable: In languages where floating features or autoseg-ments fail to surface in isolation, can they surface in the presence of other floating features
19We would have to be careful in formulating this right alignment constraint, since if the floating featuredocked to the following word, the plural would technically be rightmost in its word. Either the phonologywould need to compute the form of the plural on the noun alone, disallowing the nasal to remain floating(to be later docked to a following word), or the constraint on the plural would need to make reference tomorphological identity of its base and require all exponents of that morpheme to be to its right.
32
or morphological base modification? Future work should explore crosslinguistic data todefine the limits of tautomorphemicity.
Thus, in the featural affixation analysis of the Seenku plural, the right alignmentconstraint for the plural features prevents the floating nasal from docking to followingwords; because the plural features dock to the stem vowel, that vowel is an exponent ofboth plural and the noun, allowing the nasal to dock without violating NoTauMorDoc.For the past tense and genitive, whose only requirement is to surface on the final vowel ofthe stem rather than the right edge, the floating nasal can remain floating and surface onfollowing morphemes. The definition of NoTauMorDoc in (50) makes the predictionthat a past tense subject pronounced in isolation would be nasalized, since the lengthenedstem vowel is an exponent of both past and the noun. But since past tense subjects arealways followed by the rest of the phrase (i.e. they cannot stand on their own), sucha situation does not naturally arise and my data corpus contains no cases to test theprediction.
Turning to plural formation in nasal coda stems, we find that the right alignment offeatural affixes correctly predicts the surface forms, while the stratal account runs into amajor challenge. The featural suffixes require a vowel to dock, but the vowel is followedby a nasal coda. If the Max and alignment constraints for the plural features outrankMax(C), then the nasal coda can be lost in the plural. A hypothetical plural form like*kpEEn ‘head herders’ (from singular kpaan) would violate the strict suffixing conditionfor the plural, since the featural affixes are removed from the right edge by the nasalcoda; instead, the coda is deleted yielding the surface form kpEE. In contrast, the stratalanalysis with its vocalic suffix runs into the following problem:
(51) kpaan-ı
In §6, the coalescence of the stem and suffix vowel was motivated by a constraint againstvowel hiatus, but with a nasal coda on the stem, there is no hiatus. Without appealingto stricter and more ad hoc constraints ensuring that the singular and plural share notonly the same vowel length but also the same syllable count, we cannot account for theattested plural form kpEE.
In short, nasal stems (both floating and coda) provide further support for the featuralanalysis over the stratal analysis. I will return to a final comparison of the two analysesin the conclusion.
Before leaving this section, we must address the behavior of [+ATR] stems with afloating nasal. Recall from §2.2 that the seven-way oral vowel contrast is collapsed toa five-way nasal vowel contrast; in particular, there are no mid [+ATR] nasal vowelsin Seenku. Nevertheless, [+ATR] noun stems can also carry floating nasal features, asillustrated in (52):
(52) a. do mb‚@le‘big child’
b. gy‚o mb‚@le‘big slave’
33
There are two attested patterns of plural formation for [+ATR] stems with a floatingnasal. The extremely frequent noun ‘child’ (and its derivative forms in compounds likebıe-lo ‘baby goat’) allows the floating nasal to dock but also raises the stem vowel to[+high], a (phonetically) [+ATR] vowel that can be nasal in the Seenku vowel inventory:
(53) do(n) → du˜
i˜‘child(ren)’
There is variation in pronunciation between (53) and a form dı˜, in which the [+back]
feature is lost. Since this is the only word in Seenku that behaves this way, I assume it isa lexicalized irregular form, which would not be unexpected for a high frequency lexicalitem like ‘child’.
The more common and presumably more productive outcome is to simply delete the[+nasal] feature in the plural:
(54) gy‚o(n) → gyoe ‘slave(s)’
This indicates that Max[+ATR] and Dep[+high] must outrank Max[+nas]; apart fromthe exceptional stem ‘child’, nowhere else in Seenku do we see a loss of [+ATR] or raisingof a mid vowel to high.
To summarize, the featural analysis proposed in this paper can account for not onlyfloating featural affixes but also floating features associated with a stem. By rankingNoTauMorDoc aboveMax[+nas], we can motivate the deletion of the floating [+nasal]feature when it has no other morpheme to dock to. But when a featural suffix docks tothe stem vowel, the floating nasal also docks. This result is achieved by making a slightmodification of NoTauMorDoc wherein a floating feature cannot dock to a bearingunit that is only an exponent of the same morpheme that introduced it and by enforcingstrict right alignment of the plural suffix such that the floating nasal cannot follow it.This right alignment can even trigger the loss of a nasal coda to allow the vowel hostingthe plural features to be at the right edge. Other morphological processes like the pastand the genitive simply target the final vowel of the stem rather than the right edge,allowing the floating nasal to follow its usual behavior docking to following words andmorphemes. Finally, we have seen that feature docking is structure preserving: if docking[+nasal] would create a vowel that is not part of the phoneme inventory, the nasal featurecan simply delete. This result is achieved by prioritizing the retention of [+ATR] andpenalizing the insertion of [+high].
8 Conclusion
This paper has described plural formation and other morphological processes in Seenku;in it, I provided comparative evidence from related languages that sheds light on itsdiachronic development and discussed possible analyses to account for the synchronicdata patterns.
First, I showed that the plural data patterns are naturally accounted for with multiplefeature affixation, wherein the plural consists of a vocalic [+front] and tonal [+raised]suffix. Though Wolf (2007) argues for aMax-Flt approach to multiple feature affixation,
34
I have shown that the Seenku data can be accounted for with a combination of Maxconstraints on feature specifications and Realize-Morpheme. The difference betweenplural formation on the one hand and the similar-looking antipassive on the other comesdown to representations: the plural is featural and hence does not add a mora to theoutput, while the antipassive is a vocalic suffix carrying a mora. The behavior of nasalstems is accounted for by the plural’s strict suffixing requirement: no material belongingto the stem may follow the plural features.
I then contrasted this analysis with a stratal phonology approach, in which the dif-ference between the plural and antipassive is not one of representation but one of level.In this analysis, there is no need for featural affixes: the coalescing behavior of the pluralis accounted for by the constraint ranking at its respective level of grammar. While thetreatment of floating nasals may be more straightforward under this approach, the level-ordered analysis suffers from difficulties in both ordering the levels to obey the StrongDomain Hypothesis and in protecting underlying contour tones while forcing coalescenceof the suffix’s tone. Additionally, the behavior of stems with nasal codas is difficult toaccount for assuming a full vocalic suffix.
There may be other possible analyses for the data. For instance, we could propose ahybrid approach in which both the plural and the antipassive are vocalic suffixes but theplural is accompanied by tone features rather than full tones. This would help accountfor the issues surrounding contour tones vs. tonal coalescence, but the other issues withthe level-ordered approach would remain. Alternatively, we could turn to co-phonologies(Anttila 2002, Inkelas and Zoll 2005), which would allow suffixes to differ in their behaviorwithout assigning them to strictly ordered strata. But all of these approaches require sig-nificant complications in the morphophonological architecture, with different phonologicalgrammars required for different morphemes. The featural affixation analysis requires thelearner only to posit that phonological features, which are independently required in thephonology, can be the only exponents of morphemes; the rest falls out naturally from onesingle phonological grammar.
More broadly, this paper investigates how morphology is restructured as a result ofphonological reduction. Where do we draw the line between overt affixation and basemodification? How do we model the stages in between? Diachrony can tell us how thepatterns arose, but the sychronic patterns are all that speakers know. Successful analysismust look beyond the phenomenon in question and take into account the morphophono-logical system of the language as a whole, since this is the context within which thelearner is building his or her grammar. For Seenku, this context points to featural affix-ation as the analysis requiring the fewest assumptions. Other languages, following otherdiachronic paths, may lead learners to other conclusions.
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Bermudez-Otero, Ricardo. Forthcoming. Stratal optimality theory . Oxford Studies in TheoreticalLinguistics. Oxford University Press.
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