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Ch Morphophonology Preprint Round, Erich R. (in press) Morphophonology: lenition and assimilation, in C.Bowern (ed) Oxford Guide to Australian Languages, OUP — PRE-PRINT VERSION Morphophonology: lenition and assimilation The phonologies of the world’s languages vary not only in their static properties, such as segment inventories and phonotactics, but also in their dynamic, morphophonological alternations. In the study of Australian phonologies, static properties have long held the spotlight, with book-length works appearing already several decades ago on segments (Busby 1980) and phonotactics (Hamilton 1996). Dynamic phonology in comparison has never really taken centre stage.1 Short discussions of at most a few pages per phenomenon appear on morphophonological topics in overview works by Evans (1995a), Dixon (1980; 2002) and Baker (2014). These have proven invaluable, but the short format lends itself to the citation of particularly striking or well-known data, and since it lacks space to explore diversity in detail, can contribute to an exaggerated discourse of uniformity in Australian languages, where phenomena are rare, pervasive or absent, but seldom ‘diverse’. To address this, the current chapter presents just two studies, and a third appears in Ch NCDISSIMILATION. Each is on a topic chosen for its particular interest with respect to Australian languages, and owing to the state of the literature described above, each is (at time of writing) the most in-depth survey of that phenomenon in Australian languages to date, and fills a gap in our knowledge that has persisted for too long. Section 1 covers materials and methods. Section 2 examines lenition, a morphophonological process that is particularly common in Australian languages. Section 3 investigates assimilation, and relates it back to key phonotactic generalisations adduced in Ch PHONOTACTICS. Section 4 offer concluding remarks and section 5 lists languages in the studies and their sources. 1. Materials and methods As in Chapters SEGMENTS and PHONOTACTICS, the approach here is to mobilise large comparative datasets to provide quantitatively-backed insights into the diversity of Australian phonologies. The studies in sections 2 and 3 draw on data in the AusPhon- Alternations database. In brief, AusPhon-Alternations (AA) tracks instances in descriptive grammars where a morphophonological alternation is reported, irrespective of whether the report is in the form of (morpho)phonological formalisms, lists of allomorphs or in prose. In an initial step, these reports are recorded and marked up to indicate potential interpretations of the data, for example as being amenable to an analysis as lenition, deletion, assimilation, and so forth. As the coverage of the dataset grows and salient dimensions of empirical variation emerge, a second round of more nuanced annotations is added, and refined. The studies here are based on analyses of these late-iteration typological characterisations informed by a substantial coverage of Australian languages. The AA methodology is an approximate one, and we view the database as a significant, but nevertheless initial attempt at surveying and typologising Australia’s morphophonological variation. Notwithstanding that, the multi-stage 1 Though two major works are immanent, Baker and Harvey (to appear) and Round (in prep). 1 Round, Erich R. (in press) Morphophonology: lenition and assimilation, in C.Bowern (ed) Oxford Guide to Australian Languages, OUP — PRE-PRINT VERSION procedure has the advantage of moderating the potentially outsized influence of observations that happen to be surveyed (or to have entered the literature) first, and promotes the discovery of new insights based on evidence distributed across many languages, as sections 2 and 3 will attest. The sample drawn on for this chapter is 118 doculects (i.e., descriptions of languages, Good and Cysouw 2013).2 These contain close to two thousand alternations in total, of which a subset relevant to lenition and assimilation is studied here. Sampled languages and their source documents — without which, none of this research would be possible — are listed in section 6. 2. Lenition Lenition is a common process in the world’s languages (Gurevich 2004). It appears as a synchronic morphophonological process in more than one third of Australian languages in the AA dataset. Definitions of lenition vary, but essential to all of them is a notion of segmental weakening (Honeybone 2008). For reasons of space, I confine myself here to the most common and widespread kinds of lenition processes in Australian languages, namely alternations in syllable onset position between stops and more sonorous oral segments or zero, in which the alternations are phonologically conditioned by the sonority of the segment on the left.3 An example from Wardaman (Merlan 1994) is the dative suffix in (1), which appears as /-ku/ after stops and nasals, and /-wu/ elsewhere. (1) Wardaman (Merlan 1994:24,28,29,38) a. waɭp-ku b. lin-ku c. ȶer-wu d. wure-wu toilet-DAT snake-DAT ground oven-DAT child-DAT Only contrastive (non-allophonic) alternations are examined here. For expository convenience, I will refer to the alternations of interest as ‘lenition’, and I return the question of their synchronic analysis as lenition or as fortition in §2.7. Subsections below cover the frequencies of stops’ participation in lenition alternations according to their place of articulation in §2.1; attested pairings between stops and lenis alternants in §2.2; one-to-many and many-to-one pairings in §2.3; ranges of places of articulation at which lenition occurs in a language in §2.4; phonological conditioning in §2.5; morphological conditioning in §2.6; and the synchronic analysis of alternations as lenition or fortition in §2.7. 2 Only one doculect is used per language here. In several cases, AA contains multiple doculects for a single language. This is for future study, that may inform us about how variable the same language can appear through the lens of different sources, and therefore indicate how uncertain we should be, when we have only one description of a language. At time of writing, the AA method has been attempted with over two hundred and fifty doculects. One hundred and thirty of these were found to report any morphophonological alternations according to our procedure. 3 Related phenomena beyond the scope of this study include alternations in coda positions, lenition of sonorants, alternations between fortis and lenis stops, and sonority-conditioned alternations between stops and nasals. 2 Round, Erich R. (in press) Morphophonology: lenition and assimilation, in C.Bowern (ed) Oxford Guide to Australian Languages, OUP — PRE-PRINT VERSION 2.1 Participation of stops in lenition alternations, by plaCe of artiCulation. The lenition alternations under study here appear in 46 of the languages in the AA dataset. From a series of angles, sections 2.1–2.5 examine the frequencies with which various stops and lenis alternants participate in these alternations.4 Counts will be in terms of the number of languages in which certain patterns appear. The picture to emerge will be one of considerable variation around a core of common themes. Figure 1 Participation of stops in lenition alternations, in 46 languages Figure 1 shows the number of languages (out of 46) in which lenition alternations involve stops at each of six superlaryngeal places of articulation (see Ch SEGMENTS regarding places of articulation in Australian languages). The results reveal an essentially bimodal distribution between velar, labial and palatal stops which are frequent participants in lenition alternations, versus alveolar, retroflex and dental stops which are infrequent participants. This is broadly consistent with previous observations (Dixon 2002:627; Round 2011). However, to appreciate the import of the observation, it is necessary to clarify what Figure 1 conveys. The counts in Figure 1 are absolute tallies. They do not reveal the proportions of /k/, /p/, /t/ which undergo lenition, but merely the absolute counts. Consequently, although Figure 1 may at first glance appear to support hypothesis (2a), it could be that all stops have a broadly comparable propensity to undergo lenition, but that velars, labials and palatals are simply more common than the others, as in (2b). Indeed, Figure 1 is also consistent with hypothesis (2c). (2) Hypotheses on the propensities for stop lenition, by places of articulation a. Velar, labial and palatal stops have a higher propensity than other places. b. Stops at all places have broadly comparable propensities. c. Any other combination of relative propensities. 4 Only three of the 46 languages (Ritharrngu, Limilngan, Djambarrpuyngu) also make a fortis/lenis contrast in their stops. In Ritharrngu and Limilngan only the lenis stop series alternates with sonorants; in Djambarrpuyngu both series do. Here I abstract away from the stop series contrast, and examine stops only in terms of their place of articulation. 3 Round, Erich R. (in press) Morphophonology: lenition and assimilation, in C.Bowern (ed) Oxford Guide to Australian Languages, OUP — PRE-PRINT VERSION In order to clarify the matter, two additional contextualising counts were conducted. The overwhelming majority of lenition alternations in the AA dataset involve the initial segments of suffixes. Some do involve root- and prefix-initial segments, but it is suffixes that are driving the numbers in Figure 1. Accordingly, Figure 2 shows the frequencies by place of articulation of suffix initial stops in the complete AA dataset, not only for lenition, but for any alternation.5 It should be borne in mind that AA is limited to suffixes that alternate, so the figures may still be biased: for example, if suffix initial /t/ is numerous overall but rare in suffixes that alternate in any way, it would be underrepresented in Figure 2. To provide some insurance against that possibility, Figure 3 shows the frequencies of suffix-initial stops in the lexical dataset described in Ch PHONOTACTICS, §5. Not all languages in that dataset include suffixes among their listed lexical items, so the coverage is patchy and needs to be interpreted with caution.
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