Re: Question Re: Reduplication

At 10:22 22.9.2003 -0600, Dirk Elzinga wrote:

>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.
Wouldn't it be of some importance whether there is a /z/ phoneme or
if [z] is merely a contextual allophone?

AFMCIC the ancestral form of Sohlob has a number of determiners whose
roots are of the form _dada_, _mimi_ etc., i.e. two identical syllables
following each other.  The lang otherwise has a ban on such a root structure,
the only other exception being the nursery words _mama_ and _papa_. Now in
the evolution of the lang this specialness of determiner roots gets broken
by the phonological development (essentially consonant weakening) so that
e.g. *dada > _daz_ while the derivated stem *dadya also > _daz_, thus
obscuring the semantic relation between the derivatives.  I have been looking
for a naturalistic excuse for inhibiting consonant weakening in these forms.
Underapplication might work here.  Incidentally I feel that *papa becoming
_bab_ is less of a breach of plausibility, since here it is about how adults
choose to phonologicize the babbling of infants.




/BP 8^)
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X)
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