Abstract

A'ingae (or Cofán) is a language isolate spoken in the Ecuadorian and Colombian Amazon. This study presents a description and analysis of the language's morphologically conditioned verbal stress assignment. Specifically, I show that A'ingae verbal morphemes can be classified with two binary parameters: the presence or absence of prestressing and the presence or absence of stress deletion (i.e. dominance), which vary independently. I formalise my analysis in Cophonology Theory, a non-representational theory of the phonology–morphology interface, which captures morpheme-specific phonology with constraint rankings particularised to morphological constructions. I argue that while non-representational approaches such as Cophonology Theory can handle the facts of A'ingae stress deletion straightforwardly, representational approaches lack the expressive power necessary to capture the stress facts of the language.

Highlights

  • Phonological alternations are not always fully general in a language; certain phonological effects may show up only in certain morphological contexts, resulting in morpheme-specific phonology

  • I formalise my analysis of A’ingae verbal stress in Cophonology Theory (e.g. Orgun 1996, Anttila 1997), which captures morpheme-specific phonology with constraint rankings particularised to morphological constructions

  • I showed that the assignment of stress in A’ingae can be most modelled as an interaction between two binary parameters: the presence or lack of prestressing and the presence or lack of stress deletion

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Summary

Introduction

Phonological alternations are not always fully general in a language; certain phonological effects may show up only in certain morphological contexts, resulting in morpheme-specific phonology. Non-representational approaches, on the other hand, associate morphemes with specific phonological processes directly. Cophonology Theory (Orgun 1996, Anttila 1997, Inkelas et al 1997, Inkelas 1998, Inkelas & Zoll 2007) allows for the constraint ranking to vary with the morphological construction. A’ingae allows for contrastive stress specification on verbal roots (1a) as well as functional morphemes (1b), both of which may result in minimal pairs. I formalise my analysis of A’ingae verbal stress in Cophonology Theory Orgun 1996, Anttila 1997), which captures morpheme-specific phonology with constraint rankings particularised to morphological constructions. I argue that while non-representational approaches such as Cophonology Theory can handle the facts of A’ingae stress deletion straightforwardly, strictly representational approaches The rest of the paper is structured as follows. §2 gives background on the language, including sociolinguistic context and previous scholarship. §3 presents the data, motivating the analysis of A’ingae verbs as forming two stress classes and suffixes as forming four stress classes. §4 formalises the analysis in Cophonology Theory. §5 argues that purely representational analyses cannot account for the A’ingae stress data

Background
Sociolinguistic context
Previous scholarship
Verbal stress
Cophonology Theory
Implementation
Alternative frameworks
Stratal Optimality Theory
Gradient symbolic representations
Floating metrical stress
Empty prosodic nodes
Conclusions
Full Text
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