Alternation

This unit introduces the problems of alternation, a type of phonological phenomenon in which a unit of meaning such as a root or prefix appears to vary, that is, alternate, in its pronunciation. As this unit demonstrates, such alternations are often predictable from phonological contexts. This unit develops your ability to identify and analyze alternations. Like Unit 1, this unit focuses on segments, that is, alternations affecting segments. We leave alternations involving tone and stress to later units. This unit opens with Chapter 5, which presents an alternation impacting nasal consonants in English. As we showed in Chapter 2, English nasals are subject to co-occurrence restrictions with immediately following consonants. Chapter 5 shows that such distributional restrictions manifest themselves as conditions on alternation. This chapter highlights, among other things, the relations between distributional restrictions and conditions on alternation. Chapter 6 presents a more complex problem of alternation from Tibetan numerals. Without analyses, the problem represented by Tibetan numerals is not obvious. Only through analyses do we discover that Tibetan numerals alternate and what conditions the alternation. This chapter emphasizes the role of phonological analyses and shows how instrumental the concept of underlying representation is to uncovering the patterns of alternation and the relation between alternating forms of Tibetan numerals. Chapters 7 and 8 analyze even more complex problems of alternation: one involving Tonkawa stems and another affecting roots and suffixes in Yawelmani. You will learn not only that there are alternations but that different alternations can interact, creating complex pattern interactions. We demonstrate how such pattern interactions can be identified and analyzed. These four chapters, together with exercises, present a variety of increasingly more complex problems of alternation. They develop and strengthen your understanding of concepts such as morpheme vs. allomorph, underlying vs. surface representations, natural classes and distinctive features, rules and rule ordering, different types of rule relations and linguistic arguments, and so on.