Morphological Haplology

Abstract

A fairly common phenomenon of inflection is morphological haplology, in which an affix or clitic is absent when the adjacent part of the stem is homophonous to it, e.g. Eng. poss. pl. boys ', not boys's. Data are adduced from numerous affixes and clitics in eleven languages. Haplology may be a major or minor rule; it may show lexical diffusion; and it is subject to various specifications on how similar the ‘homophonous’ part of the stem must be, including degrees of phonological similarity and whether it too is a morpheme. These data are traditionally handled with a rule of deletion or haplology. Such an analysis is undesirable because of the false step required—the fact that deletion does no more than recover the input form; it does not explain why it is always the affix that is deleted, rather than part of the stem. It also does not explain why a haplologized clitic must always dominate the other morpheme/phonological sequence. The alternative is not to add the affix/clitic at all. This is best viewed as a case of vacuous rule application, where the rule may take the input as already satisfying the conditions of the output. Such a proposal can be made only within a morphology that stresses the prosodic nature of morphemes, as in autosegmental morphology. The origins of this phenomenon in child language and in language change are discussed.

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