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ROA:185
Title:Featural Affixation
Authors:Akinbiyi Akinlabi
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Length:56
Abstract:Featural Affixation



Akinbiyi Akinlabi

Rutgers University





Underlyingly free (floating) features occur crosslinguistically. These

features sometime function as morphemes. Such features, like segmental

morphemes, often refer to specific edges of the stem, hence they are

'featural affixes.' They get associated with the base to be prosodically

licensed. We propose to account for the association of such features

through a family of alignment constraints called 'featural alignment'

which is a featural version of McCarthy & Princeƕs Align (MCat, MCat).

Under featural alignment, an edge is defined for a feature based on a

possible licensor, which may be a root node or a mora. We argue that

misalignment takes place under pressure from feature cooccurrence

constraints. Thus a featural suffix may get realized elsewhere in the

stem, surfacing as a featural infix or even as a featural prefix. This

constraints based approach is preferred to rule based approaches since

it does not require a variety of additional assumptions needed within

rule based approaches to account for the same phenomenon. These include

structure preservation, prespecification, extratonality and filters.
Type:Paper/tech report
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Article:Version 1