Understanding Allomorphy - Perspectives from Optimality Theory - Eulàlia Bonet
Syllable-counting Allomorphy by Prosodic Templates
Understanding Allomorphy - Perspectives from Optimality Theory - Eulàlia Bonet
Jochen Trommer [+]
Leipzig UNiversity
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Jochen Trommer is Heisenberg fellow at Leipzig University and specializes in theoretical phonology and morphology, with a focus on micro- and macro-variation in lesser studied languages (Albanian, Nilotic, Uralic, and Kiranti). He has earned his Ph.D. at the University of Potsdam with a thesis on theoretical morphology (“Distributed Optimality”), has held lecturer positions at the University of Osnabrück and the University of Leipzig, and was speaker of the network “Core Mechanisms of Morphological Exponence”. Currently he is part of the graduate school “Interaction of Grammatical Building Blocks (IGRA)” and conducts a DFG-research project on featural affixation. His main interests are the learning of morphological segmentation, the role of tone in phonology and morphology, and the residue of non-concatenative morphology: polarity and subtraction.
Description
Paster (2005) presents cases of syllable-counting suppletive allomorphy (SCA) which are not driven by phonological optimization, and argues for an account using morphological subcategorization frames. In this paper, I show that all relevant cases of non-optimizing SCA can be captured by generalizing a prosodic-templatic approach for truncation to allomorphy, implementing templates by indexed constraints (Pater 2007, 2009, Flack 2007) or by affixation of prosodic material (Bermúdez-Otero 2012, Kirchner 2010, 2013). Under this analysis, templatic effects in SCA and truncation are unified and the range of possible SCA effects is substantially restricted.