Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

Here we propose that in Amharic, a Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia, geminate codas, but not other consonants, contribute to syllable weight, supporting the typology of coda-consonant syllable weight systems predicted by Hayes (1989)’s Moraic Theory. Based on data collected through eight months of elicitation-based fieldwork, we demonstrate that two independent processes of the language, stress and reduplication, serve as evidence that in Amharic geminate codas, but not other codas, are moraic.

This collection contains 36 papers presented at the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at UC Berkeley from March 23-March 26, 2016.1 This meeting of ACAL coincided with a special workshop entitled “Areal features and linguistic reconstruction in Africa”, and we are glad to include four papers from that workshop in this collection as well. Collectively, these papers add a sizable body of scholarship to the study of African languages, including valuable new descriptions of African languages, novel theoretical analyses of them, and important insights into our...

Phonological alternations are often specific to morphosyntactic context. In some cases a phonological process applies only in words of certain lexical categories. Previous theories have stipulated that such morphosyntactically conditioned phonology is word-bounded. In this paper we present a number of long-distance morphologically conditioned phonological effects, cases where phonological processes within one word are conditioned by another word or the presence of a morpheme in another word. We provide a model, Cophonologies by Phase, which extends Cophonology Theory,...

This paper analyzes two patterns of number marking in the DP in Nez Perce (Sahaptian) within the framework of Distributed Morphology. The first involves under-realization of plural on nouns. Number has classically been understood as a feature inherent to nouns, rather than to adjectives that modify them. In Nez Perce, however, only a small set of nouns show number morphology, whereas number morphology is highly productive on adjectival modifiers. Adjectives in fact may realize the plural more than once per word—an instance of multiple exponence. I show that the puzzle of under-...