Universals: Larry Hyman (Berkeley)

Date: 

Monday, November 10, 2014, 5:30pm to 7:00pm

Location: 

Boylston 335

Initial Vowel Length in Lulamogi: Cyclity or Globality?

Over the past several decades there has been recurrent skepticism concerning cyclic derivations in phonology, one of the most central tenets of traditional generative and lexical phonology and morphology. Some of the proposed cyclic analyses have been argued not to require cyclicity, or to represent lexical relations that are not totally productive (as in certain cases in English). For those surviving cases, a major strategy within optimality theory has been to capture cyclic relations by surface "output-output" (O/O) constraints. Thus, to take a standard example, génerative and derívative have different stress patterns not because they are literally derived from génerate and deríve, but because the stress of each derivative must agree with the output stress of its respective corresponding base. A particularly explicit (and hence falsifiable) component of O/O correspondence is that "a cyclic Base must be a freely occurring expression, a phrase or a free-standing word (Benua 1997, Kager 1999; Kenstowicz 1996; cf. Bermúdez-Otero 2010, Kiparsky 1998, Trommer 2013 for critical discussion and proposed counterevidence)" (Steriade 2013). In this paper I draw on original data from Lulamogi, a previously almost unstudied Bantu language of Uganda, to show that the most insightful analysis of a vowel length alternation requires either cyclicity or global reference to internal morphological structure and, in many cases, a non-free standing base. An analysis is presented that highlights the distinction between stems and prefixes, but not without a bit of a mystery.