Week 12: The morphology-phonology interface

English Morphology

Fernanda Barrientos

2025-01-21

Phonology

Phonology

Phonology is concerned with sound regularities in languages: what sounds exist in a language, how those sounds combine into syllables and words, and how the prosody (stress, accent, tone, etc.) of a language works.

  • Phonology interacts with morphology:
    • Morphemes may have two or more different phonological forms (allomorphs)
    • Some phonological rules apply when two or more morphemes are joined together.
    • Non-native morphemes may show different phonological behaviour
    • Some morphological rules may depend on the syllable structure of a language

Allomorphs

Allomorphs

Allomorphs are phonologically distinct variants of the same morpheme. That is, they do not have the same sounds, though they are still similar.

  • English in-:
    • Allomorph 1: [ɪn] \(\rightarrow\) intolerable
    • Allomorph 2: [ɪm] \(\rightarrow\) impossible
    • Allomorph 3: [ɪl] \(\rightarrow\) illegal
  • Also: English past tense -ed, which can be produced as [t] (packed), [d] (bagged), or [əd] (waited).
    • The [t] in packed is a process of devoicing
    • The insertion of a vowel to break a CC sequence is called epenthesis.

Predictable allomorphy

Assimilation

Phonological process in which segments come to be more like each other in some phonological feature, such as voicing or nasality.

  • Back to English in-:
    • Its allomorphs are predictable: they depend on the place of articulation of the following sound
    • We use [ɪn] before a vowel or alveolar obstruents
    • We use [ɪm] before labial consonants
    • We use [ɪl], [ɪr] before liquids
    • And [iŋ] before velars

Assimilation

  • Regular allomorphs are derived from the underlying representation using phonological rules.

Underlying representation

An underlying representation (UR) is a single basic mental representation for each morpheme.

  • Often, but not always, a morpheme’s UR is the form that has the widest surface distribution

Nasal assimilation

  • Assuming that the UR for the negative prefix in English is [in], we can derive the other allomorphs with a rule of nasal assimilation:

Nasal assimilation

Nasal assimilation: a nasal consonant assimilates to the point of articulation of a following consonant, and to the point and manner of articulation of the consonant if it is a liquid.

  • This process is very frequent across languages. This example is from Zoque:

Unpredictable assimilation

  • Some allomorphy is not regular:
    • Past tenses of verbs in English may display
      • ablaut
      • vowel shortening
      • devoicing
      • no change

Reduplication

  • In languages with partial reduplication, syllabic structure is essential
  • Syllables may be light: one short vowel and no coda
  • Heavy syllables have either a long vowel or a coda (or both).

  • Exercise: can you explain the pattern in these languages?

  • Diyari:

  • Mokilese:

Lexical strata

  • Let’s look at the following nonnative affixes:

Lexical strata

  • … And now let’s look at these native suffixes:

Lexical strata

  • We can see that nonnative suffixes tend to somehow change the structure of the base to which they attach:
    • By changing the stem: decide [d] \(\rightarrow\) decis-ion [ʒ]
    • By shifting the stress: ’Ger.man \(\rightarrow\) Ger.’ma.nic
    • They are also a bit “picky”: some won’t attach to native bases
  • And some of them attach to words as well as bound bases
    • Native suffixes can’t attach to bound bases!
  • This is because they belong to different lexical strata

Lexical strata

Lexical strata

Layers of word formation within a single language that display different phonological properties and different patterns of attachment.

  • An additional property of suffixes belonging to different lexical strata is that we can’t always attach a nonnative suffix to an already derived word:

    • Two nonnative: -ive + -ity \(\rightarrow\) productivity ✅
    • Two natives: -less + -ness \(\rightarrow\) hopelesness ✅
    • Native outside nonnative: -ive + -ness \(\rightarrow\) productiveness ✅
    • Nonnative outside native: -ness + -ic \(\rightarrow\) *happinessic ❌

Summary

  • Morphemes frequently have allomorphs, phonologically distinct variants that occur in different environments.
  • Sometimes they are predictable and we can derive them with a phonological rule assuming a single UR
  • Some phonological processes that explain allomorphy are:
    • assimilation
    • epenthesis
    • vowel harmony
    • syllabic structure
  • Not all allomorphy is entirely predictable
  • Affixes belonging to different lexical strata may diplay different allomorphic or phonological behaviour

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