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UC Berkeley Dissertations, Department of Linguistics Title Distributing morphologically conditioned phonology: Three case studies from Guébie Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/38g4f01q Author Sande, Hannah L Publication Date 2017-07-01 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Distributing morphologically conditioned phonology: Three case studies from Gu´ebie by Hannah Leigh Sande A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Sharon Inkelas, Chair Professor Larry Hyman Professor Peter Jenks Professor Darya Kavitskaya Summer 2017 Distributing morphologically conditioned phonology: Three case studies from Gu´ebie Copyright 2017 by Hannah Leigh Sande 1 Abstract Distributing morphologically conditioned phonology: Three case studies from Gu´ebie by Hannah Leigh Sande Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics University of California, Berkeley Professor Sharon Inkelas, Chair The focus of this study is process morphology in Gu´ebie,an endangered Kru language spo- ken in C^oted'Ivoire. Unlike many primarily affixing morphological systems, much of the morphology in Gu´ebieinvolves root-internal phonological changes like tone shift and vowel replacement. For this reason, Gu´ebiedata have much to offer discussions of the interface be- tween morphology and phonology. Based on the Gu´ebiefacts presented here, I argue 1) that process morphology, where a non-concatenative phonological process is the sole exponent of a morpheme, is a subtype of morphologically conditioned phonology, and 2) that not all morphology involves underlying phonological items. I conclude that whether a morpheme triggers a phonological process is independent of whether a morpheme is associated with underlying phonological content. Instead, morphologically conditioned phonological pro- cesses are driven by phonological constraints, whose rankings are determined by particular morphosyntactic features present in the domain being phonologically evaluated. This study describes the phonology and morphology of Gu´ebie,focusing in particular on three case studies of morphologically conditioned phonological processes. These include phonologically determined noun class agreement, scalar tone shift, and vowel replacement. In each of these case studies we see evidence for specific interactions between not only morphology and phonology, but also syntax and phonology. On the morphological side, Gu´ebietonal morphology shows us that not every morpheme is associated with an underlying (abstract) phonological item. With respect to syntax, we see that domains of phonological evaluation in Gu´ebiemust be larger than a single word, but not larger than a syntactic phase. We also see phonological processes sensitive to both morphosyntax and lexical class in Gu´ebie, suggesting that any model of phonological grammar must be able to reference morphosyntactic and lexical information. By exploring morphological exponents across a language, we can narrow down the space of possible models that account for morphosyntactic interaction with phonology. i Contents Contents i 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Process morphology . 1 1.1.1 Process morphology and morphologically conditioned phonology . 1 1.1.2 Item versus process morphology . 3 1.1.3 Evidence from a highly process-based morphological system . 4 1.1.4 The proposed model . 5 1.2 Roadmap . 6 1.3 Background on Gu´ebie . 7 1.3.1 Language background . 7 1.3.2 The consultants and corpus . 8 2 Gu´ebiephonology and morphology 10 2.1 Introduction . 10 2.2 Gu´ebiephonology . 10 2.2.1 Segmental inventory . 11 2.2.1.1 Consonants . 11 2.2.1.2 Vowels . 13 2.2.2 Syllable structure . 15 2.2.3 Minimality . 20 2.2.4 Tone . 22 2.2.5 Vowel harmony . 28 2.3 Gu´ebiemorphology . 29 2.3.1 Affixes and compounding . 29 2.3.1.1 Nominal affixes . 29 2.3.1.2 Verbal affixes . 31 2.3.1.3 Nasal harmony . 38 2.3.1.4 Genitives and compounds . 39 2.3.1.5 Summarizing concatenative morphology in Gu´ebie . 40 2.3.2 Non-concatenative morphology . 41 2.3.2.1 Phonologically determined agreement . 41 ii 2.3.2.2 Morphologically conditioned tone changes . 42 2.3.2.3 Tone replacement . 44 2.3.2.4 Vowel replacement . 45 2.3.3 Interim summary . 47 3 Phonologically determined agreement 48 3.1 Introduction . 48 3.2 Gu´ebiephonologically determined agreement . 49 3.2.1 Phonological agreement between nouns and pronouns . 50 3.2.2 Phonological agreement between nouns and modifiers . 56 3.3 An interface model of phonologically determined agreement . 57 3.3.1 Considering possible analyses . 57 3.3.2 The proposed model . 59 3.3.2.1 The syntactic structure . 61 3.3.2.2 The morphological structure . 66 3.3.2.3 The phonology . 67 3.4 Typological predictions . 72 3.4.1 Gu´ebiehuman pronouns . 73 3.4.2 Gu´ebieadjectives . 75 3.4.3 Other Kru languages . 76 3.4.3.1 Krahn . 76 3.4.3.2 Godi´e . 77 3.4.3.3 Vata . 78 3.4.3.4 Summary of Kru phonological agreement . 79 3.4.4 Bainuk . 79 3.4.5 Abu' . 81 3.5 Discussion . 82 3.6 Conclusion . 84 4 Scalar tone shift 85 4.1 Introduction . 85 4.2 Gu´ebiescalar tone shift . 86 4.3 Scalar shift in Distributed Morphology plus Cophonology Theory . 94 4.3.1 The syntax of verb movement in Gu´ebie . 94 4.3.1.1 Adverbs cannot intervene between Subject and Inflection . 95 4.3.1.2 Strict SubjVerb order . 96 4.3.1.3 Embedded clause order . 97 4.3.1.4 Movement blocked in the presence of an auxiliary . 98 4.3.1.5 Wh, Focus, Topic order . 99 4.3.1.6 Word order summary . 101 4.3.2 The morphological component . 102 4.3.3 Scalar tone cophonologies . 106 iii 4.3.3.1 The imperfective cophonology . 107 4.3.3.2 The elsewhere grammar . 111 4.3.4 Considering alternative analyses . 112 4.3.4.1 An Optimal Paradigms account . 112 4.3.4.2 Underlying representations . 113 4.3.4.3 Floating tones . 114 4.3.4.4 Floating tone features . 115 4.3.4.5 Interim summary: Underlying representations lack insight for scalar shift . 116 4.3.4.6 Extant Distributed Morphology tools . 116 4.3.4.7 Suppletive allomorphy . 117 4.3.4.8 Readjustment rules . 117 4.4 Other instances of tonal morphology in Gu´ebie. 118 4.4.1 Case marking via scalar tone shift . 118 4.4.2 Tone replacement in noun-noun compounds . 120 4.5 Conclusion . 122 5 Vowel alternations 124 5.1 Introduction . 124 5.2 Vowel reduction: CVCV to CCV . 125 5.2.1 The vowel reduction phenomenon . 125 5.2.2 Phonological properties of reducible words . 127 5.2.3 A MaxEnt-HG model of the distribution of reduction in Gu´ebie . 132 5.3 Vowel replacement . 135 5.3.1 Replacement in object contexts . 136 5.3.1.1 Phonological effects of object vowel replacement . 137 5.3.1.2 Neutralization due to vowel replacement . 138 5.3.1.3 The syntactic position of object markers . 139 5.3.1.4 Root vowel replacement with intervening affixes . 140 5.3.2 Vowel replacement in plural contexts . 141 5.3.2.1 /-A/ plural morpheme . 141 5.3.2.2 [-back, -round] plural morpheme . 142 5.3.3 No replacement in other morphosyntactic contexts . 144 5.3.3.1 Passive and Causative: No replacement, with ATR harmony 144 5.3.3.2 Definite and Nominalizer: No replacement, no ATR harmony 145 5.3.4 Interim summary: The distribution of vowel replacement . 146 5.4 Lexical specificity of vowel reduction and replacement . 149 5.4.1 Weak faithfulness to weakly encoded vowels . 149 5.4.2 The phonetics and phonology of weak vowels . 150 5.4.3 Neighborhood density effects . 153 5.4.4 Encoding strength summary . 155 5.5 A multiple-grammar constraint-based analysis . 156 iv 5.5.1 Object enclitic cophonology . 157 5.5.2 Plural cophonology . 161 5.5.2.1 Plural 1 . 161 5.5.2.2 Plural 2 . 164 5.5.3 Morphemes that fail to trigger vowel replacement . 169 5.6 Against an alternative approach . 171 5.6.1 Suppletive allomorphy . 171 5.6.2 Diacritics . 172 5.7 Conclusion . 173 6 Implications 175 6.1 What Gu´ebie tells us about process morphology . 175 6.1.1 Process morphology is morphologically conditioned phonology . 175 6.1.2 Not all morphology is item-based . ..
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