Dissertation: Morphological Sources of Phonological Length
Linguistics
Department,
Committee:
Professors Sharon Inkelas, Keith Johnson, Larry Hyman, and Johanna Nichols
Abstract.
Diverse phonological alternations are often
recruited to accomplish a single morphological effect. A familiar example comes
from Finnish (Karlsson 1999), where the nominative singular can be marked by degemination
(rattaa- --> ratas ‘wheel’), consonant voicing (hita- --> hidas ‘slow’),
or consonant deletion (kokee- --> koe ‘experiment’). Traditional feature-
and segment-based phonological theory offers no way to capture such alternations
(often referred to collectively as “lenition”) in a single analysis,
constituting a significant deficit in our understanding of the nature of spoken
words. Alternative theories have offered explanations based on abstract
hierarchies (Foley 1977, Schaefer 1982), articulatory restrictions (Ohala 1997,
Kirchner 2000), or perceptual information (Harris & Urua 2001, Harris 2005).
These theories, although they differ greatly, all share a focus on the lenition
of individual segments. Yet the domain of diversity in phonological alternations
is far wider than that. Such alternations go beyond lenition: specific morphological
effects can be accomplished with mirror-image processes of fortition, as in
Northern Sotho. And they go beyond individual segments: morphological effects
can also be accomplished by the loss or insertion of multiple segments at a time, as in Hupa. These facts suggest the
need for a very different approach to phonological diversity.
My dissertation introduces and defends
Resizing Theory, whose claim is that the overall size of a morpheme can serve as a basic unit of analysis for
phonological alternations. Size can be calculated along several independent phonetic
dimensions, including pitch, amplitude, and duration. Decreases in morpheme
size along the duration dimension, which are triggered by contact with other
morphemes during word-building, can be accomplished with degemination or
deletion of a single segment; this is relatively uncontroversial. Yet as I
show, decreases in size can also be accomplished with the deletion of multiple
segments or with voicing alternations, which are known to shorten the duration
of a consonant (Lisker 1957 et. seq; Kohler 1984; Kluender, Diehl & Wright
1988). In Resizing Theory, each of these changes possesses the same status and is
captured with the same formalism. In other words, it is the fact of an overall
decrease in morpheme size, and not the particular feature-based or segment-based
strategy used to implement it, which is linguistically significant. The same
holds for increases in morpheme size.
Resizing Theory makes three major
predictions, which I support with evidence drawn from my database of over 100
languages. The first prediction is the most basic one: alternations which decrease
(alternatively: increase) the overall size of a morpheme should pattern
together in producing specific morphological effects. The second prediction is
that contact between morphemes can completely determine the surface output of a
word. Of course, it is already well-established that morphology interacts with
phonology in order to produce surface forms (e.g. Kiparsky 1982). The novel
prediction made by Resizing Theory is that interactions between morphemes - specifically, the
imperative for one morpheme to change its size - have the potential
to play the only role in producing a
phonological form, without reference to diacritic features or segments. The
third prediction concerns null allomorphs, which have been treated as special
cases of morphological “blocking” in the literature (e.g.
The empirical scope of Resizing Theory is at
once more narrow and more broad than that of previous theories of lenition. It
does not explicitly encompass consonant manner alternations, which I suggest
are better accounted for by an orthogonal tendency for length to be associated
with stop articulations, rather than fricative or a approximant articulations
(Elmedlaoui 1993, Kirchner 2000). The theory does, however, have the potential
to encompass changes in size along other dimensions, such as pitch, and I
sketch several ways in the three predictions of Resizing Theory are borne out
in tonal phonology.
Thus, this dissertation explicitly and
formally adopts a bird’s eye view of phonological alternations that occur at
morpheme boundaries, and integrates well-established facts about phonetic
duration directly into the abstract unit of morpheme size. In so doing, it
offers a novel solution to the problem of diversity in phonology, and makes a
contribution to the literature on both the phonetics-phonology and
phonology-morphology interfaces.