Reflexes of exponent movement in inflectional morphology

Abstract

Seemingly non-local phonological operations triggered by inflectional exponents have been observed in a number of languages. Focussing on de-spirantization in Barwar Aramaic, accent shift in Lithuanian, ni-insertion in Quechua, ruki rule application in Sanskrit, and vowel harmony in Kazakh, we argue that these phenomena should be analyzed as strictly local phonological reflexes of movement in a pre-syntactic autonomous morphological component. Such morphological movement is shown to arise without further assumptions under the approach to inflectional morphology based on Harmonic Serialism (McCarthy 2016) developed in Müller 2020. Here, each morphological operation immediately gives rise to an optimization procedure, morphological structure-building is subject to simple alignment constraints, and counter-cyclic operations are precluded. Against this background, phonological reflexes of movement are predicted to show up when a potentially complete word triggers a phonological cycle, which is then followed by morphological movement. Finally, we argue that constraint-driven morphological movement is superior to alternative accounts based on (i) non-local phonology, (ii) base-derivative faithfulness, (iii) phonological movement, (iv) counter-cyclic operations (interfixation, lowering, local dislocation), (v) syntactic movement, and (vi) strata.