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Phonological Aspects of Western Nilotic Mutation Morphology

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Phonological Aspects of Western Nilotic Mutation Morphology Phonological Aspects of Western Nilotic Mutation Morphology Habilitationsschrift zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Dr. phil. habil. der Philologischen Fakultat¨ der Universitat¨ Leipzig eingereicht von Dr. Jochen Trommer geb. 13.12.1970, Neustadt an der Waldnaab angefertigt am Institut fur¨ Linguistik Beschluss uber¨ die Verleihung des akademischen Grades vom: 24. Juli 2011 “Can there be any rebirth where there is no transmigration?” “Yes there can” “Just as a man can light one oil lamp from another “but nothing moves from one lamp to the other” “Or as a pupil can learn a verse by heart from a teacher “but the verse does not transmigrate from teacher to pupil” Chapter 1 Problems It is the cornerstone of non-traditional linguistics that a lexicon of a language consists of ar- bitrary pairs of morphological and phonological representations: morphemes. In this book, I want to defend the hypothesis that the interface of Phonology and Morphology is essen- tially blind to this arbitrariness: Morphology is not allowed to manipulate the phonological shape of morphemes. Phonology is barred to access the identity and idiosyncratic features of morphemes. Morphology may not convey diacritic symbols to Phonology allowing to iden- tify (classes of) morphemes, or control the operation of phonological processes for the sake of specific morphemes (see Scheer 2004, Bermudez-Otero´ 2011, for similar positions). This excludes many theoretical devices which are standardly used to derive non-concatenative mor- phology: Word Formation Rules (Anderson 1992): Morphological rules equipped with the full power of derivational phonological rules in classical Generative Phonology (Chomsky and Halle 1968). Readjustment Rules (Halle and Marantz 1993, Embick and Halle 2005, Embick 2010): Phono- logical rules which are triggered by the morphosyntactic context and a standard means in Distributed-Morphology to capture ablaut and similar patterns. Indexed Constraints (Pater 2006, 2007) Optimality-theoretic phonological constraints which are restricted to (induce constraint violations only for) specific morphemes. Cophonologies (Inkelas and Zoll 2005): Optimality-theoretic subgrammars whose constraint ranking is determined idiosyncratically by specific morphemes. Morphophonological Pheromones: The Red and Trunc morphemes of Generalized Tem- plate Theory (McCarthy and Prince 1994, 1995) whose only motivation consists in trig- gering copying or truncation in Phonology. Another case are the boundary symbols of Frampton (2010) which are generated by Morphology and trigger copying or metathesis operations in Phonology. Put positively, I assume that Phonology has only access to very general grammatical infor- mation, boundaries of morphemes and morphological constituents (allowing the construc- tion of prosodic element such as Phonological Words), the categorization of morphemes as roots/affixes (McCarthy and Prince 1995, Urbanczyk 2006), heads, adjuncts or complements of morphological constructions (Revithiadou 1999, Bachrach and Wagner 2007), and general 3 4 CHAPTER 1. PROBLEMS levels of phonological stratification (Kiparsky 2000, Bermudez-Otero´ 2011). In the frame- work I will assume in this book - a stratal and fully autosegmental implementation of the Col- ored Containment version of Optimality Theory (van Oostendorp 2006b, Revithiadou 2007), this means that the essential information phonology has about morphology is that underlying phonological material has specific colors which makes it possible to reconstruct whether two phonological entities are affiliated to the same morpheme or to different morphemes. The empirical area of Nonconcatenative morphology I will affront is mutation morphology in Western-Nilotic, where I will understand ‘mutation morphology’ with Wolf (2005a, 2007) as comprising not only consonant mutation, but any morphologically induced phonological alternation which at a naive descriptive level targets segments: changes in vowel quality, seg- mental length and tone patterns, which are all abundantly documented in Western Nilotic as shown in (1) with examples from Thok Reel (Reid 2010): (1) Mutation Morphology in Thok Reel (Reid 2010:29) a. Vowel Quality (i) éOˆ:r ‘forest:NOM:SG’ éaˆ:r ‘forest:NOM:PL’ ¨ ˜ ¨ (ii) tet` ‘dig:3SG’ ˜ tE´t ‘dig:1SG’ b. Tone (i) cO´w ‘husband:NOM:SG’ ˜ cO`w ‘husband:NOM:PL’ (ii) no´::p ‘send:AP:3SG’ no`::p ‘send:3SG’ ¨ ˜ ¨ c. Vowel Length (i) gat` ‘child:NOM:SG’ ˜ ga`::t ‘child:NOM:PL’ (ii) m´ı”t ‘feed:AP:3SG’ m`ı::”t ‘feed:3SG’ ¨ ˜ ¨ d. Voice Quality (i) ro`::k ‘molar.tooth:NOM:SG’ ro`::k ‘molar.tooth:NOM:PL’ ˜ ¨ (ii) no´::N ‘bring:AP:3SG’ no´::N ‘bring:3SG’ ˜ ¨ e. Stem-Final Consonant (i) é´Ic ‘belly:NOM:SG’ ˜ éˆI”t ‘belly:NOM:PL’ (ii) re´:c ‘rat:NOM:SG’ re´::j ‘rat:GEN:SG’ ¨ ˜ ¨ In fact, Western Nilotic exhibits some of the most striking and complex patterns of mutation found in the languages of the world. Consider for example the “process” derivation in Anywa (Reh 1993:247-248) where verbs acquire an inchoative meaning by five logically independent phonological changes:1 • Non-liquid root-final consonants are nasalized (c´an, ‘be poor’ ) c`2n, ‘become poor’) • Root-final consonants are geminated (pˇo:l, ‘be blunt’ ) p`o:l:, ‘become blunt’) • Verb roots adopt low tone (é´o:m, ‘be soft’ ) é`o:m:, ‘become soft’) 1Note that gemination in Anywa does not generally trigger shortening of preceding vowels. 5 • Root vowels get [a] (p´O:”t, ‘be smooth’ ) p`o:n”:, ‘become smooth’) • Non-mid root vowels are shortened (dˇI:ñ, ‘be narrow’ ) d`ıñ, ‘become narrow’) The general approach to morphology I assume is what I call the Concatenativist Hypothesis stated in (2) (see Stonham 1994, Lieber 1992, Wolf 2007, Bye and Svenonius 2011, for related approaches): (2) The Concatenativist Hypothesis: Morphology = Concatenation + Suppletion + Phonology In particular, I will assume with Bermudez-Otero´ (2011) that ‘nonconcatenative morphology’ is the consequence of affixing ‘defective’ (or incomplete) phonological material which attaches to phonological material of the morphological base – Bermudez-Otero´ calls this approach ‘Generalized Nonlinear Affixation’. Thus I assume that the Anywa process morpheme contains i.a. a low tone and the feature [a] which consequently show up on verb roots since the affix itself lacks adequate segmental (or prosodic) material which could serve as a host. A potential danger the restrictiveness of Generalized Nonlinear Affixation faces is that incomplete phonological structure might be used diacritically by invoking constraints which specifically refer to (underlyingly) floating pieces of phonology. In this way, floating phono- logical material might be abused as a trigger for essentially morphological rules. To avoid this kind of arbitrariness, I assume the following theoretical meta-restriction: (3) No Explicit Floating: No phonological constraint may refer specifically to floating structure (to phonological nodes not associated underlyingly to segments) Mutation morphology in Western Nilotic (and more generally) raises three substantial em- pirical problems for the Concatenativist Hypothesis – especially from an optimality-theoretic point of view. (4) The 3 Big Problems • The Overwriting Problem: What does defective (floating) phonological material al- low/force to “replace” corresponding phonological features which are preassociated to base segments (and protected by faithfulness constraints on association)? • The Inconsistency Problem: Why does mutation morphology often show up in differ- ent forms in different contexts (e.g. as L-tones with H-tone bases and as H-tone with L-tone bases, cf. tonal polarity in Dinka discussed in chapter 5)? • The Divergence Problem: Why do features involved in mutation morphology some- times behave phonologically differently from features which are part of segmental af- fixes? These problems will be the main topic of this book and will be introduced in more detail in the following four sections 6 CHAPTER 1. PROBLEMS 1.1 The Overwriting Problem Following the influential papers by Wolf (2005a, 2007), I will illustrate the Overwriting Prob- lem with the classical case of featural consonant mutation from the Bantu language Aka (Akin- labi 1996), where the singular of class 5 nouns is expressed without a segmental affix by voic- ing the initial root: (5) Voicing Mutation in Aka (Akinlabi 1996) Class 5 - singular Class 6 Plural a. gO`al` a` ma-` gO`al` a` (game of imitation) b. bel` el` e´ ma-` bel` el` e´ ‘sound of waterfall’ c. dZamb´ a` ma-` dZamb´ a` ‘mud’ d. de`Nge´ ma-te`Nge´ ‘piercing tool’ e. gas´ a´ ma-kas´ a´ ‘palm branch’ f. bap` ul` ak` a` ma-pap` ul` ak` a` ‘lung’ Under the standard autosegmental analysis (see Lieber 1992, and references cited there), mu- tation is partially morphological and partially phonological. On the morphological side, it involves affixation of floating features, i.e. features which are not associated to root nodes. On the phonological side, there are processes which integrate the floating featural material into segments of the base by associating them to adjacent root nodes. This leads to delinking of underlying features for the involved segments and hence to overwriting. Thus for Aka, we might assume that the class 5 singular morpheme is a prefix which has the structure in (6):2 (6)[ +voice] $ [+sing +class5] If (6) is affixed to a noun such as k´as´a, phonological processes associate the [+voice] of the affix to the root node of the adjacent stop k and delink the segment of the underlying [–voice] feature, which results in surface g´as´a. If attached to bases with initial
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