Week of November 13

Harvard Colloquium and mini-lecture

We're pleased to announce that Coppe van Urk's talk and mini-lecture, as part of the Harvard colloquium, are happening this week (November 15 -17)! Both the talk and the mini-lecture will be hybrid and the Zoom link will be provided. Details are as follows: 

Mini-lecture

Title: Explaining the preference for nonconcatenative morphology in Dinka

Speaker: Coppe van Urk (Queen Mary University of London)

Time: 

- Wednesday November 15 @ 5:00–6:30pm; 

- Thursday November 16 @ 3:00–5:00pm

Location: Boylston 103 (Wednesday), Boylston 303 (Thursday)

Abstract: Dinka (South Sudan; Western Nilotic) has been cited as a problem for item-based approaches to morphology, because of its apparent preference for nonconcatenative processes (e.g. Aronoff and Fudeman 2011:54; Inkelas 2014:72; Arkadiev and Klamer 2018:450). Dinka has complex verbal and nominal paradigms, in which most morphological categories are marked solely through changes in vowel quality, tone, voice, and length in a monosyllabic root. In this mini-course, based on joint work with Adam Chong, I present a complete concatenative analysis of Dinka verbal morphology. I demonstrate that Dinka morphology in fact provides evidence for an underlyingly item-based view of Dinka. First, all Dinka nonconcatenative morphology is additive (see also Trommer 2015, 2022), once we allow for bimoraic templates and replacive grammatical tone. Second, all four properties that express morphological categories in the root are restricted in overt affixes. On this basis, I argue for an approach in which bans on contrast in vowel quality, tone, voice, and length drive the realization of an affix in the root. In this way, Dinka provides evidence for a direct relationship between the wellformedness of affixation and nonconcatenative morphology. Finally, I develop a new account of Dinka tone, showing that grammatical tone is always inward-looking (Inkelas 1998, Alderete 2001, Rolle 2018), contra claims in Trommer (2011, 2022).

Talk

Title: How to be a word in Atara Imere

Speaker: Coppe van Urk (Queen Mary University of London)

Time: Friday November 17 @ 12pm

Location: Emerson 305

Abstract: Many languages impose a binary minimum on words, of at least two syllables or two moras. In McCarthy and Prince’s (1993) Prosodic Morphology, such minima follow from general constraints on metrical structure. However, a number of authors have noted mismatches between metrical constraints and minimality in specific systems (Garrett 1999; Gordon 1999; Downing 2005, 2006). Downing (2005, 2006) argues that binary minima may arise because of a pressure to ensure that morphological prominence, such as of roots, correlates with phonological complexity (Dresher and van der Hulst 1998). This talk presents novel data from the Polynesian outlier Atara Imere (Vanuatu), gathered in Vanuatu in June 2023. Atara Imere supports a metrical approach to minimality in at least two ways. First, Atara Imere imposes a trimoraic minimum due to strict antepenultimate stress (Clark 1998, 2002). At first glance, the trimoraic minimum holds only of roots, supporting Downing’s observation. But we show that apparently subminimal functional items trigger obligatory prosodic integration into the preceding prosodic word, diagnosed by stress shift (see also Gordon and Applebaum 2010 on Kabardian). In fact then, all morphemes are subject to the trimoraic minimum. The apparent lexical-functional divide derives from the distribution of affixation.

Hope to see you all there!