Analyzing Sound Patterns An Introduction to Phonology

Introduction

In this chapter, we continue to explore problems of prosodic morphology. One morphological process used widely by many languages is reduplication, a word-formation process that relies on repeating or copying a form or part of it and concatenating it to this form. Reduplication varies from language to language. But one unifying characteristic is that the copied portion of a reduplicated form tends to take on a specific shape, even though the base – the form upon which the copy is based – varies in its shape. A central challenge posed by reduplication, like that posed by Arabic broken plurals, is how to explain this invariant shape of reduplicated forms. The data we use to illustrate reduplication come from Swati verbs. Swati verb reduplication is selected for three reasons. First, it involves both base reduction and expansion. Second, Swati reduplication shows up with segments not supplied by the base. Finally, Swati reduplication treats syllables with onsets differently from those without onsets. These characteristics are seen in other languages with reduplication. For these reasons, Swati reduplication illustrates some of the key issues in analyses of reduplication. We present two analyses here. One relies on copying and template mapping, similar in key respects to the template-and-circumscription proposal in McCarthy and Prince (1990). The second proposal looks at reduplication from Optimality Theory (OT). We demonstrate how issues not raised by earlier analyses are asked and addressed in OT-based analyses of reduplication.