The Puzzle of Learning Disjunction
Monthly Archives: February 2020
LingLang Lunch (2/26/2020): Casey Lew-Williams (Princeton)
Infants learn from meaningful structure in their communicative environments
LingLang Lunch (2/19/2020): Maksymilian Dąbkowski (Brown)
The morphophonology of A’ingae verbal stress
I analyze A’ingae stress assignment as determined by factors from two domains: (i) phonological, where I propose a typologically unattested glottal accent assigned at the level of the prosodic foot, and (ii) morphological, with accentual specification of suffixal lexemes. By attributing a part of the observed complexity to independently motivated glottal accent, I reduce the number of distinct lexical specifications needed to explain the six distinct accentual patterns to four suffix types. I further analyze the four different suffix types as an interaction between two binary parameters that characterize each suffix: recessive vs. dominant; and plain vs. prestressing.
The analysis is carried out in the framework of Cophonology Theory, a restrictive Optimality Theoretic approach, which allows for a parsimonious account of complex patterns emergent from interactions between phonology and morphology.