Issues in the Phonology-morphology Interface in African Languages

Abstract

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2012) Issues in the Phonology-Morphology Interface in African languages Larry M. Hyman University of California, Berkeley Invited plenary presented at the 43 rd Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 43), Tulane University, New Orleans, March 15-17, 2012 • Submitted to the Proceedings Introduction A major issue in the study of interfaces concerns the difficulties in disentangling morphology from other parts of the grammar. As Spencer (1991: xii) puts it: “Morphology is unusual amongst the subdisciplines of linguistics, in that much of the interest of the subject derives not so much from the facts of morphology themselves, but from the way that morphology interacts with and relates to other branches of linguistics, such as phonology and syntax.” Basic questions include: What is (vs. isn’t) morphology? How or when should morphology be identified as something different from phonology? As Inkelas (2008: 1) points out, there is much in common between realizational morphology and morphologically conditioned phonology: “Morphology and phonology intersect insofar as the statement of morphological generalizations includes information about sound patterns (realizational morphology), and insofar as the statement of phonological generalizations includes information about morphology (morphologically conditioned phonology). This intersection is extensive, blurring the distinction between morphology and phonology in many situations.” Although African languages are quite varied in how they treat morphology (including barely at all), their contribution to our understanding of the phonology-morphology interface comes largely from the following areas: (i) tonal morphology, e.g. tonal morphemes (Welmers 1959), cyclic tonology (Pulleyblank 1985, 1986); (ii) segmental “featural affixes” (Akinlabi 2011), e.g. labiality, palatality, consonant gradation; (iii) non-concatenative morphology, e.g. CV templates (McCarthy 1981, 1986); (iv) reduplication, especially Bantu, e.g. Downing (1999, 2000), Hyman, Inkelas & Sibanda (2009). Because of the centrality and variety of tonal interfaces in so many African languages, I propose to limit discussion to tonal morphology and make the following points: (i) Tonal morphology can do anything that non-tonal morphology can do; (ii) tonal morphology can do more than non-tonal morphology can do; (iii) tonal morphology often obscures the compartmentalization of phonology, morphology, and syntax. My starting point is the more general question I raised and answered in Hyman (2011: 214): Tone: is it different? Answer: Tone is like segmental phonology in every way—only more so!