Morphophonology

Abstract

In its broadest definition, morphophonology refers to the interaction of word formation (linguistic morphology) with the sound system of language (phonology). These two linguistic subsystems interact in many different ways in the languages of the world, including phonological alternation of a stem or affix, vowel harmony involving both stems and affixes, spread of a phonological feature as a grammatical marker, combinations of patterns of consonants and vowels in non-concatenative morphology, and phonologically definable reduplication. After describing the facts surrounding these types of interaction between morphology and phonology, a variety of analyses is presented. These analyses include, among others, the theoretical frameworks of Lexical Phonology and Morphology, Autosegmental Phonology, Templatic and Prosodic Morphology, and Optimality Theory.