Identity Effects in Morphological Truncation

Abstract

Morphologically truncated words may be phonologically irregular, constituting a class of exceptions to regular surface patterns.1 In this paper I propose that phonological irregularities in truncated words are identity effects forced by constraints demanding identity between truncated forms and their source words. These constraints, which are ranked and violable in the Optimality Theory model (Prince & Smolensky 1993), regulate the correspondence relation between the source word base and the truncated form, in the same way that faithfulness constraints require identity of base and copy in reduplicated words (McCarthy & Prince 1993a et seq.). I will show that truncated words mimic derived properties of their sources, and conclude that truncatory correspondence is a relation between two output forms. Building on proposals in McCarthy & Prince (1994b, 1995), this analysis of truncatory identity extends Correspondence Theory beyond basereduplicant and input-output relations, establishing correspondence between separate words.