| ROA: | 285 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Formal Property Inheritance and Consonant/Zero Alternations in Maori Verbs |
| Authors: | Nicholas Kibre |
| Comment: | 60 pages. Comments welcome |
| Length: | 60 |
| Abstract: | Formal Property Inheritance and Consonant/Zero Alternations in Maori Verbs Nicholas Kibre nick@stl.research.panasonic.com Word-forms are organized according to two types of structure: grammatical and phonological. In most formal frameworks, this is modeled through the interplay of phonological and morphological modules and/or constraints. Not all generalizations can be unambiguously assigned to one of these domains, however. This paper examines one such case in Maori, where what were originally phonologically-motivated patterns of allomorphy have arguably been reanalyzed as competing paradigms. A purely phonological analysis, whether framed in terms of rules or constraints, is unable to capture this fact without recourse to arbitrary devices, yet a purely morphological approach is unable to capture the degree to which the phonological constraints originally motivating the alternations are still valid. This paper proposes to address this conundrum through a formal model of word formation in which both generalized morphological metarules and phonological constraints are allowed to function as redundancy formalisms across classes of both individual words and morphological rules. In this way both the morphological character and phonological motivation of alternations such in Maori can be captured. The proposed framework draws on components Generative, Optimal and Lexical-Network models. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |