Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

This paper presents data bearing on two key issues in morphophonological theory: 1) the domain of phonological evaluation, and 2) the item- versus process-morphology debate. I present data from Guébie (Kru) [Côte d’Ivoire] showing that imperfective aspect is exponed by a scalar shift in surface tone, which can affect either the tone of the inflected verb, or the subject noun phrase. There are four tone heights in Guébie, and the first syllable of a verb can underlyingly be associated with any of the four tones. In imperfective contexts only, that initial verb tone lowers one step on...

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.