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

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Summary

Introduction

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.

Process morphology and morphologically conditioned phonology
Item versus process morphology
Roadmap
Guébie scalar tone shift
Verb tone lowering
Subject tone raising
Scalar shift in Distributed Cophonology Theory
The morphological component
Scalar tone cophonologies
The imperfective cophonology
The elsewhere grammar
Considering alternative analyses
An optimal paradigms account
Underlying representations
Floating tones
Binary floating tone features
Cumulative relational tone features
Interim summary
Suppletive allomorphy
Other instances of tonal morphology in Guébie
Case marking via scalar tone shift
Tone replacement in noun-noun compounds
Conclusion
Full Text
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