Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

Dąbkowski and Sande present at BCGL 14

December 8, 2021

Maksymilian Dąbkowski and Hannah Sande will be giving a talk at the 14th Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL) on Thursday, December 16, 2021 at 6:50AM Pacific. Their talk is entitled "Phonology-syntax interleaving in Guébie focus fronting." [abstract] [handout]

Hyman speaks at Cal State Fullerton

December 6, 2021

Larry Hyman will give a Zoom Linguistics Colloquium talk at California State University, Fullerton on Friday, December 10, 2:30-3:45 pm. The title of his talk is "Deverbal nominalizations in Runyankore." Click here for the abstract and registration link.

Cross-word morphologically conditioned scalar tone shift in Guébie

Hannah Sande
2018

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...

The division of labor between representations and cophonologies in doubly conditioned processes in Amuzgo

Yuni Kim
Hannah Sande
2020

This paper introduces a doubly conditioned phonological alternation in Amuzgo (OtoManguean) [Southern Mexico], where both a morphologically specific condition and a lexically specific condition must be met for a phonological alternation to surface. We interpret previous frameworks as making distinct specific predictions about the locality restrictions of the two conditioning factors in doubly morphologically conditioned phonology. We test these predictions against the Amuzgo case study.

Syllable weight in Amharic

Hannah Sande
Andrew Hedding
2017

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.

Morpheme-specific phonology in reduplication

Hannah Sande
2021

Reduplication is used in many languages to realize one or more morphosyntactic features. Often there are multiple different grammatical uses of reduplication within a single language. In such languages, the distinct reduplication processes may be subject to different phonotactic restrictions. In other words, reduplication can be associated with morpheme-specific or construction-specific phonology. Additionally, when the reduplicant is larger than a single segment, it can in some cases copy (supra)segmental material from more than one morpheme. This paper explores the locality domain of...

Theory and description in African linguistics

Emily Clem
Peter Jenks
Hannah Sande
2019

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...

Is word-level recursion actually recursion?

Taylor Miller
Hannah Sande
2021

There is a longstanding debate in the literature about if, and where, recursion occurs in prosodic structure. While there are clear cases of genuine recursion at the phrase level and above, there are very few convincing cases of word-level recursion. Most cases are—by definition—not recursive and instead best analyzed as different constituents (e.g., the Composite Group, Prosodic Word Group, etc.). We show that two convincing cases of prosodic word-level recursion can easily be reanalyzed without recursion if phonology and prosody are evaluated cyclically at syntactic phase...

Cophonologies by Ph(r)ase

Hannah Sande
Peter Jenks
Sharon Inkelas
2020

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,...

Person-based split ergativity in Nez Perce is syntactic

Amy Rose Deal
2016

Nez Perce is one among many ergative languages that consistently use nominative case, rather than ergative, for 1st and 2nd person transitive subjects. Two major lines of analysis have been proposed for the synchronic grammar of this type of ergative split. Morphological analyses approach the phenomenon as a case of syncretism between ergative and nominative in 1st and 2nd person; all transitive subjects are assigned an identical syntax. Syntactic analyses posit a featural or structural distinction between 3rd person subjects and 1st and 2nd person subjects, or the clauses containing...