Background

• In the last few classes of this course, we will be mainly concerned with the interaction between phonology and morphology. • Today, we are mainly concerned with so-called prosodic morphology. 1 Basic tenets of prosodic morphology A very popular topic of discussion in the phonological literature of the past few decades, has been the study of ProsodicMorphology, the types of morphol-ogy which refers to elements of prosodic structure, such as morae, syllables and feet. Examples of prosodic morphology are infixation and reduplication. One basic claim of Prosodic Morphology is (McCarthy & Prince, 1998): (1) Morphological processes use the same prosodic structures as ordinary phonology: morae (µ), syllables (σ), feet (Ft) and phonological words (ω). The following is an example of reduplication from Ilokano. As in many lan-guages, reduplication expresses plurality on nouns: (2) káldíN ‘goat ’ kál-káldíN ‘goats’ púsa ‘cat ’ pús-pusa ‘cats’ kláse ‘class ’ klas-kláse ‘classes’ jyánitor ‘janitor ’ jyan-jy’anitor ‘janitors’ róPot ‘litter ’ ro:-róPot ‘litter (pl.)’ trák ‘truck ’ tra:-trák ‘trucks’ 1 2 Basic tenets of prosodic morphology In these examples, the copied part (the reduplicant) has been highlighted. It is easy to see that this reduplicant is a heavy syllable σµµ in all cases. The idea is that the plural suffix in Ilokano takes this shape: it is an ‘empty ’ heavy syllable which has to be materially filled with segments from the base. Note, by the way, that the mora theory is a convenient way to express this. Notice that it is not the case that we just copy the first syllable of the stem. The first syllable of pusa presumably is pu. In order to fill the heavy syllable template, however, we have to add the s which is part of the second syllable. The reason why the vowel is lengthened in ro:-róPot and tra:-trák has something to do with preferences of syllable structure, which we will not discuss here. We thus imagine the derivation of a reduplicated plural in Ilokano in the following way