Amharic Infixing Reduplication Targets Heavy Syllables

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UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2014) Amharic infixing reduplication targets heavy syllables Hannah Sande January 2, 2015 Introduction Amharic, a Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia, has a crosslinguistically unique infixing reduplication pattern. The plural marker on adjectives and the iterative marker on verbs are reduplicative infixes which target heavy syllables. This means these infixes can only surface in words containing heavy syllables. Adjectives without heavy syllables must find an alternative way to express plural agreement with a plural head noun, and iterative phrases containing a verb without a heavy syllable must find an alternative means of expressing iterativity. Here I describe the infixing reduplication system in Amharic and demonstrate that the target of infixation in Amharic further illuminates the typology of infix- ation pivots as presented by Yu (2007, 2003). Yu claims that infixes target linear, segmental, or prosodic positions that every word is likely to have, specifically word edges, and prominent positions (Yu 2003:193). Yu proposes two competing pres- sures determining infix location the edge and prominent infix positions we see crosslinguistically. First, the Salient Pivot Hypothesis (Yu 2007:9) states that phonological infixes target psycholinguistically or phonetically salient positions. Second is the idea that infix sites are more reliable if more words possess that site (Yu 2003:195). These two pressures work together to ensure that infixes surface in salient positions present in most words. Amharic reduplication targets not an edge or the most prominent position in a word; it targets heavy syllables, which are not present in every word. Thus, based on the data presented throughout this paper I propose a constraint-based account of reduplicative infixation in Amharic (Prince, 1995), and I posit a modification to Yu (2007)’s list of possible infixation targets. Amharic is spoken by 21,600,000 people in Ethiopia and another 200,000 out- side of Ethiopia. Unless otherwise specified, the data presented in this paper comes from original work with two native speakers of Amharic from September