Abstract
This paper presents data bearing on two key issues in morphophonological theory: 1) the domain of phonological evaluation, and 2) the item- versus process-morphology debate. I present data from Guébie (Kru) [Côte d’Ivoire] showing that imperfective aspect is exponed by a scalar shift in surface tone, which can affect either the tone of the inflected verb, or the subject noun phrase. There are four tone heights in Guébie, and the first syllable of a verb can underlyingly be associated with any of the four tones. In imperfective contexts only, that initial verb tone lowers one step on the four-tone scale. If the tone of the verb is already low, the final tone of the subject raises one step instead. This paper demonstrates that in order to account for the cross-word tonal effects of the imperfective morpheme, phonological evaluation must scope over more than one word at a time; specifically, it must scope over a syntactic phase. Additionally, I show that with phonological constraint rankings sensitive to morphosyntactic construction, no abstract phonological underlying form of the imperfective morpheme is necessary.
Highlights
The primary concern of this study is how to best represent morphological categories that are exponed solely by phonological alternations to a root or stem
This section examines a pattern of scalar tone shift in Guébie (Kru) [Côte d’Ivoire], which only occurs in imperfective contexts
We show that a number of standardly adopted tonal representations cannot straightforwardly account for scalar shift; the phonological item itself is not enough to trigger scalar tone shift at the juncture between subject and verb, and reference to morphosyntactic features is necessary, just as in the cophonologies account with no underlying representation
Summary
The primary concern of this study is how to best represent morphological categories that are exponed solely by phonological alternations to a root or stem. The scalar tone shift in Guébie presents a interesting challenge for theories of morphophonology, in that the exponent of a single morpheme, the imperfective aspect, is exponed on either the inflected verb, or on the immediately preceding subject noun phrase, depending on the underlying tone of the verb. This crossword exponence requires phonological evaluation of more than one word at a time.
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