Re: Question Re: Reduplication

On Sunday, September 21, 2003, at 12:43  AM, David Peterson wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> If you had a language with a pretty standard intervocalic voicing rule
> (let's say, /s/ > [z] / V_V), yet you had reduplication, how would
> that affect the voicing rule?
>
> I realize that it's simply a matter of rule-ordering and cyclicity,
> but I was just wondering what's more common among natural languages
> that feature reduplication and intervocalic voicing (or intervocalic
> anything, for that matter).
>
> Here's an example:
>
> Phonemically: /sopo/ > /sosopo/
> Phonetically: [sopo] > [sosopo] or [sozopo]?
This was one of the hot topics in phonology when I was in grad school.
There are three possibilities: 1) overapplication, where phonological
processes applying to the base of reduplication also apply to the
reduplicant, even though the conditions for the application of the
phonological process have not been met ([sopo] -> [zozopo], showing
intervocalic voicing in both base and reduplicant), 2)
underapplication, where phonological processes which might otherwise
apply to the base don't because they can't apply to the reduplicant as
well (your example above of [sosopo]), and 3) normal application, where
processes apply "normally" (your example of [sozopo]). What seems to be
at issue here is the relative importance of making the reduplicant and
the base match. When this requirement is valued highly by the grammar,
you get either overapplication or underapplication; in both of those
cases, the reduplicant matches the base exactly with respect to the
specific property under investigation. There are a surprising number of
languages which show either over- or underapplication; look at John
McCarthy and Alan Prince's papers "Correspondence and Reduplicative
Identity" (1995) and "Faithfulness and Identity in Prosodic Morphology"
(1997); they provide several examples of each type and generate a
typology of over-/underapplying languages within Optimality Theory.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"I believe that phonology is superior to music. It is more variable and
its pecuniary possibilities are far greater." - Erik Satie

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