Pre-publication version, please use caution in citing, to appear in Morphology (journal) Multiple feature affixation in Seenku plural formation Laura McPherson (Dartmouth College) Abstract Nominal plural formation in Seenku involves two surface changes: fronting of the final vowel and raising of the final tone. Diachronically, the plural patterns likely derive from a suffix *-˝ı, which has been obscured through the loss of falling sonority diphthongs. By comparing plural formation to other morphophonological processes in Seenku, this paper argues that the plural suffix has been restructured as a featural suffix consisting of two features: the vocalic feature [+front], resulting in vowel fronting, and the tonal feature [+raised], resulting in tone raising. Given the atomic nature of the morphosyntactic feature plural, Seenku plural formation represents a strong case of multiple feature affixation, albeit a case that can be ac- counted for through Max constraints on feature values (Lombardi 1998, 2001, etc.) and Realize-Morpheme (van Oostendorp 2005, Trommer 2012) rather than the constraint Max-Flt argued for by Wolf (2007). A level-ordered approach retaining the vocalic suffix is also considered but is shown to suffer from a number of short- comings, particularly with respect to tone and a challenging class of nasal stems. In short, this paper explores how the synchronic grammar copes with the vestiges of affixal morphology in a language that has undergone heavy reduction. 1 Introduction Seenku (ISO 639-3 [sos], exonym Sambla or Sembla) is a Northwestern Mande language of Burkina Faso with very little apparent affixation. The majority of morphosyntactic meanings are conveyed either analytically or through what appear to be patterns of base modification. The nominal plural is, at first glance, no exception. On the surface, the plural is marked by tonal and/or vocalic modifications to the root, as shown in the following singular-plural pairs:1 (1) Singular Plural Gloss a. b‚EE b`EE ‘pig(s)’ b. s˝u s˝ui ‘antelope(s)’ c. kˆa k˝E ‘yam(s)’ 1Data are transcribed largely in IPA but with a few changes designed to bring Seenku writing in line with other orthographies in the region. Thus, IPA /j/ is written as <y>; /é/ is written as <gy>; /Ã/ is written as <j>; and /c/ and <ky>. The four tones are transcribed in the following ways: extra low (X) is marked with a double grave accent <‚a>, low (L) with a grave accent <`a>, high (H) with an acute accent <´a>, and super high (S) with a double acute accent <˝a>. Common contours include L-S, marked with a hacek <ˇa>, H-X, marked with a circumflex <ˆa>, and S-X, marked with an umlaut <¨a>. Tones are marked only on the initial vowel of a long vowel or diphthong and only on the main vowel of a sesquisyllabic word like t@gˆE ‘chicken’; see §5.2 for more discussion of sesquisyllabicity and tone. 1 In (1a), the sole difference between the singular and the plural is tonal. In (1b), the nucleus of the syllable /u/ in the singular becomes the diphthong ui (pronounced [ui]) in the plural, but the tone remains the same. In (1c), there is both a tonal change from“ H-X to S as well as a vocalic change from /a/ to [E]. As I discuss in §3 and §4.3, the diachrony of the data patterns is clear but the question remains: How has this erstwhile system been restructured? In this paper, I will argue that these apparent base modification patterns are indeed the result of affixation in Seenku but of phonological features instantiating morphosyntactic categories rather than indepen- dent phonological elements, such as tones or segments. Specifically, the plural consists of two phonological features, a vocalic feature [+front] and a tonal feature [+upper]. This pair of features is suffixed to the root, triggering changes in the final vowel and tone. The surface form is chosen by a constraint-based grammar optimizing the realization of the suffixal features and the preservation of root contrasts. There are a number of implications of this analysis. First, it adds to a growing body of work on featural affixes (McCarthy 1983, Lieber 1987, Wiese 1994, Akinlabi 1996, Wolf 2007, Trommer 2012 etc.), showing that this is a viable and not uncommon phenomenon cross-linguistically. Second, the tonal patterns support a system of tone features along the lines of that envisioned by Yip (1980) or Pulleyblank (1986). Moreover, these tone features are shown to be very active in Seenku morphology beyond the plural as featural affixes, which is rarely reported in the literature as compared to segmental features like [voice] or [nasal]. Third, since both vocalic and tonal changes result from the affixation of a feature, the plural in Seenku illustrates another case of multiple feature affixation; given the atomic nature of the morphosyntactic feature plural, I argue that these two features cannot be decomposed into multiple morphemes, as argued by Trommer (2012) for other cases of putative multiple feature affixation. However, I show that there is no need for Wolf’s (2007) Max-Flt approach to multiple feature affixation, in which there is special faithfulness to floating elements, since a combination of Max constraints on feature values (Lombardi 1998, 2001; Zhang 2000; Kim and Pulleyblank 2004) and Realize-Morpheme (van Oostendorp 2005, and favored by Trommer 2012) can account for Seenku plural formation and other morphological processes. Finally, there is a class of nouns in Seenku that end either in a floating nasal or in a nasal coda. The former is unable to dock tautomorphemically (Wolf 2007) in the singular; in the plural, the vowel of the root is nasalized, suggesting that the docking of a featural affix on a vowel is enough to render that vowel non-tautomorphemic from the standpoint of the floating nasal. I thus propose a modification to the constraint NoTautoMorphemicDocking whose ramifications can be empirically tested by looking at other languages with bans on tautomorphemic docking. These data patterns are discussed in §7. Featural affixation is not the only conceivable way to treat the synchronic data pat- terns. Vowel and/or tone coalescence may also explain the patterns, but a distinction between plural formation on the one hand and nearly identical antipassive formation on the other shows that such an analysis would require a stratal approach (e.g. Kiparsky 1982, 2000), with plural formation preserving stem length distinctions by deleting the suf- fix’s mora and antipassive formation neutralizing them by retaining the mora. I discuss the viability of the stratal approach in light of other morphological processes in Seenku in §6, showing that it faces a number of issues particularly in terms of tonal behavior and in level ordering. While floating nasal stems are well accounted for with a vocalic suffix, stems with nasal codas provide additional evidence that such an approach cannot 2 be defended. Featural affixation provides a straightforward way to account for all of the data patterns. The paper is structured as follows: In §2, I introduce the language and lay out the vowel and tone inventories that provide the relevant background to plural formation. §3 briefly discusses plural formation in related Samogo languages to set the stage for Seenku plural formation, whose data patterns and diachrony are laid out in §4. The featural approach is detailed in §5, first demonstrating the mechanics of featural affixation before formalizing it with a constraint-based grammar in §5.3. §6 considers a level-ordered alternative approach, and the two analyses are tested with challenging data from nasal stems in §7, where the featural analysis is shown to account for a wider range of data. Finally, §8 concludes. 2 Background 2.1 Language and data Seenku is a Northwestern Mande language of the Samogo subfamily spoken by a total of around 16,000 people in southwestern Burkina Faso (Lewis et al. 2016). It has two primary dialects, Northern Seenku (endonym Timiku, named for Karangasso, the center of the dialect zone) with 5,000 speakers and Southern Seenku (endonym Gbeneku, named for Bouend´e, the center of its dialect zone) with 11,000 speakers. There exists a sketch grammar of Northern Seenku (Prost 1971) and a master’s thesis (Congo 2013) on aspects of Southern Seenku phonology, but the language is otherwise undescribed. The data for this paper are drawn from primary field notes on Southern Seenku gath- ered with speakers in Burkina Faso and New York City from 2013-2016. 2.2 Vowel inventory Seenku displays a typical Mande vowel inventory, with a seven-way contrast in quality for oral vowels, shown in (2): i u e o (2) E O a A near minimal set for the seven vowel qualities is given in (3):2 2The alveolar plosive /t/ is realized as the affricate [ts] before high vowels. 3 (3) Oral vowels /u/ tsˆu ‘hippo’ /o/ t‚o ‘know’ /O/ t˝O ‘leave’ /a/ tˆa ‘fire’ /E/ t´E ‘who’ /e/ tˆe (genitive particle) /i/ tsˆı ‘unmarried’ Length is contrastive and is preserved in the plural, which I will argue to support a featural rather than vocalic plural suffix. The following provides minimal or near minimal pairs for vowel length in oral vowels: (4) Long vs. short oral vowels /u/ s˝u ‘antelope’ /uu/ s˝uu ‘directly’ /o/ fˆo ‘fonio’ /oo/ fˆoo ‘wind’ /O/ (m´o) d‚O ‘(my) shoulder’ /OO/ d‚OO ‘beer’ /a/ kˆa ‘griot’ /aa/ kˆaa ‘fight’ /E/ kyˆE ‘vagina’ /EE/ kyˆEE ‘plant sp.’ /e/ j@b˝e ‘clothes’ /ee/ (m´o) ky@b˝ee ‘(my) kidneys’ /i/ s˝ı ‘tree sp.’ /ii/ s‚ıi ‘water jar’ This seven-way contrast is collapsed to a five-way contrast in nasal vowels; [+ATR] mid vowels have no nasal counterparts.