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Underspecification, the feature hierarchy and Tiv vowels*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2008

Douglas Pulleyblank
Affiliation:
University of Southern California and University of Ottawa

Extract

The major issue with regard to underspecification theory is whether all types of redundant information should be excluded from underlying representations, or if not, then what the principles are that determine the inclusion or exclusion of particular types of information. The vowel system of Tiv, a Niger-Congo language of Nigeria, is particularly interesting in this regard since the representation of individual vowels in verbal roots requires a type of radical underspecification: no features are actually assigned to vowels underlyingly; surface forms result from the interaction of morpheme-level specifications with rules of spreading and redundancy.

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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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