Identity avoidance in phonology and morphology

Abstract

Many languages avoid sequences of homophonous elements, be they phonemes or morphemes. It is argued that a single principle underlies all such cases of avoidance, and that this principle can interact with the rest of the grammar resulting in the omission of one morpheme, or forcing a choice between different syntactic outputs. This paper is formulated within Optimality Theory, and makes three main points. 1 First, at least some inputs to the Optimality Grammar must be abstract morphological specifications like PLURAL. They are phonologically incomplete outputs of the morpho-syntax. Second, morpheme realization results from an attempt to meet output targets in the form of constraints: REPEAT, 2 =a; PL=s, and so on. Such morphemes do not have underlying forms in the familiar sense (cf Hammond 1995, Russell 1995). Third, the target constraints may be out-ranked by phonological constraints of various kinds, particularly constraints against the repetition of elements, here called the OCP. The elements may be phonological (feature, segment) or morphological (affix, stem). These findings support the view of Pierrehumbert (1993a) that identity has broad cognitive roots. Section 1 gives some background on the handling of morphological data in OT. Section 2 discusses identity avoidance in morphology and sets out the basic proposal. Section 3 discusses cases of adjacent homophonous morphemes in Mandarin, English, and Classical Greek. Section 4 looks at homophonous morphemes on adjacent words (but which are not themselves string-adjacent) in English and Hindi. Section 5 looks at reduplication in Javanese, and argues that echo-words result from the tension between a requirement that penalizes a sequence of two identical stems, OCP(Stem), and one that requires two identical stems, REPEAT(Stem). This work took place over some time, and resulted in two papers: the present work, and a detailed exploration of reduplication and identity-avoidance in Javanese, Yip (forthcoming). The early sections form the necessary background to both papers, and are largely identical; the data and analyses in each paper are different, although complementary. 1. Morphology in Optimality Theory: Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993, McCarthy and Prince 1993a, and a host of others) as currently conceived is a theory of not only phonology but also many aspects of

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