Prosodic templates

Abstract

AbstractProsodic templates are morphological constructions, sometimes stem-forming and in other cases associated with derivational or inflectional morphological categories, which directly constrain the phonological shape of the derived stem. Templates have played a highly significant role in theories of phonology and morphology. From the perspective of phonology, templatic shape contraints have played an important role in illuminating the nature of phonological representations. On the morphology side, templates have been cited as evidence that morphology is not strictly concatenative. Templatic effects challenge the boundary between morphologically conditioned phonology and process phonology. This chapter surveys a variety of templates from the familiar root and pattern morphology of Semitic to lesser known cases, and poses the question of whether templates are units of phonological representation or the emergent effect of a cluster of morphologically conditioned phonological patterns in the same morphological context.