Re: CV metathesis Q

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 2:05 PM, Jeffrey Jones <jsjonesmiami@...>wrote:

> I've been playing with a sketch where most of the verbs have two basic
> stems, CVCVC and CVCCV, to which a number of affixes are added. Mostly,
> I've been working on filling in the specific morphology and on subsequent
> development (sound changes etc.) but recently, I started wondering exactly
> how the two stems came about in the first place. Any ideas?
>
> I should probably mention that the first stem can take (C)V(C) suffixes
> while
> the second can take C((C)V) suffixes and that some of the suffixes also
> have
> alternating forms (CVC vs. CCV and VC vs. CV).
>
> I've been googling and it seems most morphology theorists disapprove of
> this
> sort of thing.
>
I'm not sure why this should be a problem. If the CVCCV stem is the unmarked
form, the CVCVC stem can be derived from it by requiring the stem to fill an
iambic template (light syllable followed by a heavy syllable). A. Gafos
proposed something like this for Semitic in a paper that appeared awhile ago
in Language.

The kinds of suffixes that each stem takes would follow from wanting to
minimize syllable codas and consonant clusters; thus, vowel-initial suffixes
with consonant-final stems, and consonant-initial suffixes with vowel-final
stems. All of this is doable in Optimality Theory, if that's your thing.

Dirk
--
Miapimoquitch: Tcf Pt*p+++12,4(c)v(v/c) W* Mf+++h+++t*a2c*g*n4 Sf++++argh
La----c++d++600