ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: PRECEDENCE AND THE LACK THEREOF: PRECEDENCE-RELATION-ORIENTED PHONOLOGY Maxime Papillon, Doctor of Philosophy, 2020 Dissertation Directed by: Professor William Idsardi Department of Linguistics The study of representations, their limits and capacities, is an indispensable part of the formal study of language. The representations are the limits of what can be stored and computed upon, and the details of a representation have a major influence on the form of any analysis. Broadly, the goal of this thesis is to explore a lower bound of complexity for the phonological module. By exploring the capacities of a representation that I will argue requires fewer stipulations than anything offered before it, I will defend the claim that the freedom of this more powerful representation matches the power of morphology. More specifically I will argue that the representation of phonology is not strings, but directed graphs, and that this representation is simpler and more powerful and that its power exactly matches the set of attested phenomena of word-formation and phonology. The goal of this dissertation is to expand on the theory of Multiprecedence (Raimy, 2000), which is both promising and under-explored. PRECEDENCE AND THE LACK THEREOF: PRECEDENCE-RELATION-ORIENTED PHONOLOGY by Maxime Papillon Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2020 Advisory Committee: Professor William Idsardi, Chair/Advisor Professor Naomi Feldman Professor Omer Preminger Professor Norbert Hornstein Professor Bob Slevc c Copyright by Maxime Papillon 2020 Acknowledgment I have many people to thank for making this thesis possible. I would like to thank my thesis committee. My supervisor Bill Idsardi guided me for the past five years into exploring the questions that had been interesting me for so long. I would also like to thank Naomi Feldman, Omer Preminger, Norbert Hornstein, and Bob Slevc for their feedback and pointed questions and commentary. There is my cohort who provided me the best social support you can ask for. I thank Suy- oung Bae, Annemarie van Dooren, Phoebe Gaston, Chia-Hsuan Liao, and Paulina Lyskawa. I want to thank the members of all the groups, classes, and meetings with which I shared the ideas of this research at various stages. I particularly thank the members of the Phonology Circle who attended multiple stages of this research: Christian Brodbeck, Zara Harmon, Cassidy Henry, Nika Jurov, Justin Malˇci´cThomas Schatz, and Craig Thornburn. I thank Armel Jolin and Marjorie Leduc for bearing with me as i taught them the intricacies of the system. I thank the students who attented the EGG 2016, and the UMD students who attended my class on Long-Distance Phenomena in Phonology. I thank all my fellow students and post-doctorate colleagues with whom I discussed every topic of linguistic in or out of this dissertation. I cannot possibly list everyone I ever conversed with, but i want to single out Aaron Doliana, Mina Hirzel, Nick Huang, Gesoel Mendes, and Sigwan Thivierge for the stimulating linguistic conversations. I would also never have made it here without my previous supervisors: Charles Reiss who first introduced me to the ideas expanded in this thesis, and Marc Brunelle who helped me sharpen my interest in the phonetic complexity of Language and languages. I also want to thank all the undergraduate professors who guided me here: Alan Bale, Mark Hale, Dana Isac, and Madelyn Kissock. I am also thankful for the financial support of the Canadian Social Sciences and Hu- manities Research Council who supported the research presented here. I also want to thank my family who supported me in my health issues. And particularly thank you Amy for your constant support. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements . ii Table of Contents . iii 1 Introduction . 1 2 Preliminaries: Raimy (2000), strings and precedence . 5 2.1 Raimy 2000 . 5 2.2 Detailed Mechanics . 9 2.3 Going Full PROP . 14 3 Tone and Harmony . 18 3.1 Basic geometry . 18 3.2 Basic examples . 19 3.2.1 Mende tone melodies . 19 3.2.2 Vowel Harmony in Akan . 21 3.2.3 Siane Tone patterns . 23 3.2.4 Finnish Transparent vowels and Turkish opaque vowels . 25 3.2.5 Disharmony and Antiharmony . 30 3.2.6 Underlying vs. harmonic rounding in Moloko . 32 3.3 Plugging-in . 35 3.3.1 Parafixes . 35 3.3.2 Tone Donation . 38 3.3.3 Digo Verbal Tonology . 41 3.3.4 Digo in Kisseberth (1984) . 55 3.4 Summing up . 57 3.5 PROP compared to its alternatives . 58 4 Affix position and Reduplicative size . 61 4.1 Affix position in Tamazight Berber . 62 4.2 Circumfixation in Georgian and Amatlan Zapotec . 66 4.3 Variable-position affixes in Afar . 67 4.4 Unpredictable Infixation . 72 4.5 Free variation of reduplicant location in Tagalog . 74 4.6 Reduplicant size in Malagasy . 77 4.7 Unpredictable Reduplicant size in Woleaian . 79 4.8 Conclusion . 81 5 Phonologically-Conditioned Allomorphy . 83 5.1 Background: representing alternatives . 83 5.2 Basic geometry . 87 5.3 Examples . 88 5.3.1 Consonant/Vowel Sensitivity in Korean . 88 5.3.2 Partial suppletion in English a/an ................... 89 5.3.3 ± Approximant sensitivity in Swedish . 90 5.3.4 ±Nasal sensitivity in Nishnaabemwin . 91 5.3.5 Feature-level suppletion in Bari . 92 iii 5.3.6 Default allomorphs . 93 5.3.7 Non-sticky-end default in Russian and Tahitian . 99 5.3.8 Opaque Allomorphy in Japanese . 101 5.3.9 Non-Attaching Allomorphs . 102 5.4 Further Issues . 104 5.4.1 Terminology: `Allomorphy', 'Suppletion', `Irregularity' . 104 5.4.2 PROP vs. Hudson & Hooper . 107 5.4.3 PROP vs. Subcategorization . 108 5.4.4 Outward-sensitive allomorphy, and root allomorphy . 110 5.4.5 The gradability of suppletion . 113 5.4.6 PROP and surface optimization . 114 5.4.7 Scheer (2016) and melody-sensitivity in PCA . 116 6 Morphologically-Conditioned Allomorphy . 132 6.1 Examples . 132 6.1.1 Romanian stem-allomorphy determining the suffix . 132 6.1.2 English Adjectivizer . 134 6.1.3 Allomorphy and Affix position in Nisga'a . 138 6.1.4 Lexically conditioned masculine marker in Catalan . 141 6.1.5 Final Consonants in French Adjectives . 144 6.1.6 Hungarian bidirectionally-conditioned allomorphy in Plural Possessives150 6.1.7 French preposition+article forms . 151 7 Interaction of parallel structures with reduplication . 156 7.1 Tuvan vowel and harmony overwrite in reduplication . 158 7.2 Tone remaining on a single copy in Yao . 162 7.3 Tone-overwrite and semi-parallelism in Hausa . 163 7.4 Sye allomorphy in reduplication . 164 7.5 Muskogean reduplication . 170 7.6 Reduplication with a `weakened' copy as partial reduplication . 172 8 Using and learning graphs . 179 8.1 Phonetic implementation . 179 8.1.1 Nesting Principle . 181 8.1.2 Resuming gestures . 183 8.2 Acquiring the parallel features of vowel harmony . 184 8.3 Planning parallel articulations . 188 8.4 Alignment as a coordination problem . 189 9 Further Phenomena, Analyses, Observations, and Suggestions . 190 9.1 Regular Phonological Processes . 190 9.1.1 Phonological Processes on Graphs in Raimy (2000) . 190 9.1.2 Phonological processes on Graphs in PROP . 195 9.2 Regular alternations as partial overlap . 201 9.3 Metathesis & Coalescence . 204 9.3.1 Faroese . 205 9.3.2 Rotuman . 206 9.3.3 Indonesian . 210 9.3.4 Spanish root allomorphy . 213 9.4 Complex segments . 214 9.5 Ineffability and paradigmatic gaps . 217 9.6 Templatic Morphology . 220 iv 9.7 Parallel features not pronounced throughout the form . 221 9.8 Featural parafix in Mokulu . 223 9.9 Peak Delay . 224 9.10 Self-placing affixes & Prosodic Optimization . 227 9.11 Above the `word': graphs all the way up . 230 9.12 Intonation as morphemes . 241 9.13 Syllables and Stress . 242 9.14 Bracketing Paradoxes . 246 9.15 Marginal Phenomena . 247 9.15.1 Blends . 247 9.15.2 Ablaut Reduplication . 248 10 Conclusion . 251 v Chapter 1.