Cross-word morphologically conditioned scalar tone shift in Guébie

Bibliographic Data

ID4887400
AuthorsHannah Sande (0000-0003-1335-8717, Georgetown University, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume28
Issue3
Pages253-295
Publication date2018-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMorphology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1871-5621 • E-ISSN: 1871-5656
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s11525-018-9327-1
OpenAlexW2811505974
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited55

This paper presents data bearing on two key issues in morphophonological theory: 1) the domain of phonological evaluation, and 2) the item- versus process-morphology debate. I present data from Guébie (Kru) [Côte d'Ivoire] showing that imperfective aspect is exponed by a scalar shift in surface tone, which can affect either the tone of the inflected verb, or the subject noun phrase. There are four tone heights in Guébie, and the first syllable of a verb can underlyingly be associated with any of the four tones. In imperfective contexts only, that initial verb tone lowers one step on the four-tone scale. If the tone of the verb is already low, the final tone of the subject raises one step instead. This paper demonstrates that in order to account for the cross-word tonal effects of the imperfective morpheme, phonological evaluation must scope over more than one word at a time; specifically, it must scope over a syntactic phase. Additionally, I show that with phonological constraint rankings sensitive to morphosyntactic construction, no abstract phonological underlying form of the imperfective morpheme is necessary

Audiology · Comparative linguistics · Linguistics · Speech recognition · Tone (literature · Computer Science · Law · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Medicine · Philosophy · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation