Codas in Amis Reduplication

This paper is mainly concerned with the codas in reduplication in the central dialect of Amis, distributed over the eastern coast of Taiwan, and illustrates a variety of intriguing patterns which are here studied in the framework of Optimality Theory (abbreviated as OT), based on Prosodic Morphology. One important discovery is that Amis final codas play a role in discriminating full reduplication vs. reduplication in Amis. In the literature on Formosan reduplication, it is noted that final codas impede full reduplication. In Amis, CVCV reduplication in tlo-tlo ‘the state of breaking ’ derived from tlo ‘to break ’ is complete reduplication, while the CVCV reduplication in wia-wia ‘many friends ’ derived from wia ‘friend’ is partial reduplication. It seems that there is an implicational law: the existence of a final coda in the base implies partial reduplication. This verifies the schema ranking: prosody dominates morphology (P » M) claimed by McCarthy and Prince (1993). In addition, the No-Coda constraint dominates the Final Coda constraint. However, if we take kinco-co ‘extremely tight’