Reduplication without Template Constraints: A Study in Bare-Consonant Reduplication

Abstract

Recent analyses in reduplication have questioned the viability of template constraints to account for reduplicant shape in Optimality Theory. Such template constraints require the mapping of a reduplicant to prosodic unit such as the foot, syllable, or mora. Such template constraints make incorrect predictions regarding the types of reduplicative patterns and incorrectly match morphological types to prosodic types. The alternative is to eliminate template constraints and allow the shape of reduplicants to be determined by more general strucutural constraints in language.In this dissertation, I make two major contributions to this body of work. One major contribution is the presentation of data regarding bare-consonant reduplication (Semai, Marshallese, Coushatta, Yokuts, Secwepemc). In this data, reduplicants surface as a copy of a single consonant (C) (eg. Marshallese yibbiqen 'chunky (distributive)') or a string of two consonants (CC) (eg. Yokuts giy’igyißta 'touch repeatedly'). The reduplicants in these data are not clearly delimited by a prosodic unit, and therefore, provide support for the position that template constraints are not only undesirable, but empirically inadequate.The second contribution to this body of work is an alternative method of analysis that accounts for reduplicant shapes by the interaction of constraints that are independently necessary to account for the ordering of morphemes in a morphologically-complex form. Under this proposal, reduplicants are "compressed" between morphemes and the edges of the morphological word. This compression model uses constraints of the Generalized Alignment schema of constraints (McCarthy & Prince 1993b). The model is more empirically adequate than alternative a-templatic analyses.The compression model is extended to cases of reduplication in which the reduplicant is not a consistent prosodic unit across a paradigm (Hopi). Also this model is shown to be adequate to account for cases of reduplication that are more transparently matched to a prosodic unit (Ilokano). Such extensions of the compression model make predictions about types of non-concatenative morphology that have empirical evidence.

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