Floating mora affixation in Huozhou diminutive subtraction

Abstract

This paper argues for an item-and-arrangement approach by demonstrating that the diminutive form in Huozhou Chinese results from the affixation of a floating mora. Diminutives in Huozhou Chinese are formed by deleting the final non-vocalic segment of a syllable, along with some subsegmental changes (e.g., [pʰɑŋ35] ‘plate’, [pʰaː35] ‘plate.DIM’). This paper provides a detailed description of these patterns and proposes that the underlying representation of the diminutive morpheme is a floating mora, with subtraction serving as a repair strategy for this floating mora affix. This paper makes two main contributions. First, it introduces new data on subtractive morphology. Second, it provides a formal analysis and further supports this proposal from a typological perspective, thereby supporting the item-and-arrangement approach to morphology. Overall, by combining a case study of Huozhou Chinese with a typological discussion, this analysis shows that nonconcatenative morphology can be interpreted as additive, leading to a more economical grammar and more restrictive predictions.