Analyzing Sound Patterns An Introduction to Phonology

Prosodic morphology

In this last unit, we move the investigation from phonological problems to problems of word formation, the domain of morphology. One area of morphological studies, known as prosodic morphology, is concerned with the prosodic shapes of morphological units and how they come about from the ways words themselves are formed. This unit introduces three distinct problems of prosodic morphology and shows how they are analyzed. There are three chapters in this unit. We open with Chapter 20, which introduces a problem from Arabic. In Arabic, the plural forms of nouns referred to as broken plurals surface with a consistent initial shape. In addition, part of broken plurals appears to be correlated to singular stems. This chapter evaluates two analyses of these properties of Arabic broken plurals: the template-and-circumscription account of McCarthy and Prince (1990) and the parafixation-and-transfer account of Hammond (1988). As we show, they present two drastically different views of how Arabic broken plurals are constructed. Then in Chapter 21, we analyze a common word-formation process, that is, reduplication. Reduplication refers to a word-formation process, which constructs new forms of words by copying or duplicating an existing word or part of it and then concatenating it to this word. A crosslinguistic property of reduplication is that the reduplicant, that is, the copy, tends to have a fixed phonological form similar to that of Arabic broken plurals. Using Swati reduplication as an example, this chapter presents the templatic and optimal-theoretic explanations of this invariant property of reduplication. Finally, Chapter 22 juxtaposes two problems that appear on the surface to be totally unrelated: Swati infixing reduplication versus Luganda glide epenthesis. This chapter demonstrates that these two problems – one morphological and one phonological – are driven partially by one requirement of syllables, that is, syllables must have onsets. As a matter of fact, a key claim of prosodic morphology is that word-formation processes such as Arabic broken plurals and Swati reduplication are governed at least partially by principles of phonology. One main investigative focus of prosodic morphology is to uncover the relations between phonology and morphology. These three chapters, together with the exercises that follow, are designed to familiarize you with the issues and concerns of prosodic morphology and develop your abilities to identify and analyze problems associated with Prosodic Morphology.