This dissertation presents a theoretically informed study of A’ingae (or Cofán, iso 639-3:con), an Amazonian language isolate spoken in Ecuador and Colombia. The first part of the dissertation is descriptive. In a chapter on phonology, I touch on the language’s phonotactics, laryngeal agreement, diphthongal processes, recent sound changes, nasal spreading, as well as prosody and glottalization. In a chapter on morphosyntax, I describe the structure of A’ingae sentences, including matrix and (co)subordinate clauses, auxiliary verbs, serial verb constructions, wh-movement, and second-position clitics, as well as the morphology of A’ingae verbs, including the meanings of verbal morphemes and their co-occurrence restrictions.
The second part of the dissertation is theoretical, and focuses on the verbal morphophonology of A’ingae metrical stress and glottal stops. A detailed study of the operations that these features trigger (and undergo) reveals an interaction of two morphophonological parameters: (i) stratum and (ii) stress dominance. First, verbal suffixes are organized in two morphophonological domains (or strata): inner and outer. The strata are mapped from word-internal morphosyntactic domains: vP and AspP correspond to the inner domain, while TP and CP correspond to the outer domain. Second, some verbal suffixes delete stress (i. e. they are dominant). Dominance is unpredictable and independent of the suffix’s domain, but dominance and the phonological domain interact in a non-trivial way: Only inner dominant suffixes delete glottalization. Patterns of opacity show that the morphophonological processes triggered by A’ingae suffixes apply cyclically.
The A’ingae dataset demonstrates that a theory of the phonological architecture must be able to model phonological stratification while allowing for morpheme specific phonological idiosyncrasies, but also that the phonological grammars of domains and of individual suffixes may intersect in a non-trivial way. Moreover, A’ingae’s major phonological domains (inner and outer) correspond to word-internal syntactic constituents, which shows that phonological analysis must be planted firmly on morphosyntactic ground. I formalize my account in Cophonologies by Phase (CbP) (Sande, Jenks, and Inkelas, 2020), which is a generative model of the morphosyntax-phonology interface. Since CbP accommodates the stated desiderata, it is uniquely suited for capturing the A’ingae grammatical patterns.