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The power of a single representation: morphological tone and allomorphy

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Abstract

This paper investigates the question of how much work phonology can do in accounting for apparently suppletive but phonologically predictable allomorphy. Two case studies of surface alternations in the domain of morphological tone are discussed and monorepresentational optimality theoretic analyses are proposed that predict the apparent suppletive allomorphies from a single underlying representation for the morphemes in question.

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Notes

  1. It has to be noted, though, that nothing crucially hinges on this and that the analysis could in principle be reimplemented in correspondence-theoretic OT (McCarthy and Prince 1995, et seq.).

  2. The constraint type and its implications for other areas of non-segmental affixes are discussed in Trommer and Zimmermann (2014).

  3. This, for example, explains a shortening rule that reduces CVː to CV in the first word of a compound. If CVː attracts stress, then this would simply be a clash avoidance. But cf., for example, Pike (1948) or Mak (1950) for the alternative view that CV1V1 is bisyllabic.

  4. Or before the second tone. Since all bases in SMG are binary, both analyses make the same prediction.

  5. Mixtec languages vary in whether there is evidence for one or the other claim. Whereas Buckley (1991) argues that M is indeed the absence of tone in Chalcatongo Mixtec, there are various Mixtec languages where true contour tones involving M-tones exist and M hence trivially cannot be the absence of tone (e.g. in San Esteban Atatláhuca Mixtec, Mak 1953; or Yucunany Mixtepec Mixtec, Paster and Beam de Azcona 2004). In the SMG tone system, there is no independent evidence that favours one or the other assumption.

  6. Note that Max(T-μ) is ranked above #H! ensuring that bases which are underlyingly specified for LH realize this tonal melody faithful and do not, for example, spread the H to the initial TBU to avoid a violation of #H!.

  7. There is no agreement whether the glottal is a segment on its own (Tranel 1995b), a glottalization feature on a vowel McKendry (2013), or even on a whole couplet (Macaulay and Salmons 1995). I follow the assumption in Tranel (1995b) that it is indeed a glottal stop. However, nothing hinges on that: an interaction of a glottal stop with tone is as expected and well attested as an interaction of vowel phonation type and tone (cf. e.g. Yip 2002; Silverman 1997).

  8. Note that this is different from the assumptions in Tranel (1995b) where a glottal specification intervenes on the tonal tier. This relies on a concept of NoCrossing where non-parallel pairs of (to be) associated elements interact: a glottal specification on the tonal tier associated to a segmental root node/timing tier blocks association of a tone to its TBU on the moraic tier. This is in contrast to the definition of NoCrossing in (6-a).

  9. An interesting restriction is that words in KK can be specified for maximally two tones and the distribution of tone to words with fewer TBU’s than tones is consistent with a derivational account where 1:1 association of tones to TBU’s starts at the right edge (Baart 1999b, 91).

  10. There are additional vowel quality changes that are ignored in the following. Whereas masculine words form their inflected form via a change from /a/ to /ä/, feminine words show /u/ → /i/, /o/ → /e/, /ä/ → /i/, and /a/ → /e/ (Baart and Zaman Sagar 2004, 21). It is assumed that the representation for the inflection morpheme is in fact more complex and contains additional floating vowel features that cause this mutation.

  11. The term ‘complete overwriting’ is hence not entirely correct: only L-tones of the base are overwritten by the H.

  12. Given the assumption that coda consonants are always moraic and that trimoraic syllables are marked, the stem stratum predicts that the second μ in CVːC syllables is shared (Broselow et al. 1997) and associated to both V and C as can be seen in (27). A syllable with three μ’s is expected to surface, however, in contexts where the inflected forms of nouns ending in a long vowel is optimized: realization of both the affix-μ and the stem-μ’s is more important than the avoidance of trimoraic syllables.

  13. That the inflected form for some nouns is marked via suffixation and not the regular tonal change is apparently idiosyncratic; as is the choice between the plural suffixes.

  14. In fact, this could also be analysed as the more general ban on words with more than three tones (cf. footnote 9) that holds on the surface for all words in KK.

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Acknowledgements

For valuable comments and discussion I am grateful to the participants of the colloquium Neuere Arbeiten zur Grammatiktheorie at Leipzig University, of the Conference on Allomorphy: its Logic and Limitations (Jerusalem, July 6–8, 2014) and of AMP 2015 (Vancouver, October 9–11, 2015). I am also indebted to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. This research was supported by a DFG grant to the project ‘Featural Affixes: The Morphology of Phonological Features’ (TR 521/6–1).

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    Eva Zimmermann

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This work was supported by a research grant of the German Research Foundation (TR 521/7-1). Otherwise, there are no conflicts of interest.

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Zimmermann, E. The power of a single representation: morphological tone and allomorphy. Morphology 26, 269–294 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-015-9276-x

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