| ROA: | 185 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Featural Affixation |
| Authors: | Akinbiyi Akinlabi |
| Comment: | |
| 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 & PrinceÕs 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 |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |