Abstract
This article develops an analysis of a pair of morphological alternations in K’ichee’ (Mayan) that are conditioned at the right edge of intonational phrase boundaries. I propose a syntax-prosody mapping algorithm that derives intonational phrase boundaries from the surface syntax, and then argue that each alternation can be understood in terms of output optimization (Mascaró 2007; Mester 1994). The important fact is that K’ichee’ requires a prominence peak rightmost in the intonational phrase, and so the morphological alternations occur in order to ensure an optimal host for this prominence peak. Finally, I consider the wider implications of the analysis for the architecture of the syntax-phonology interface, especially as it concerns late-insertion theories of morphology (Anderson 1982, 1992; Embick and Noyer 2001; Halle and Marantz 1993; Hayes 1990, among others). The primary result is that late lexical insertion must occur at least as late as the construction of intonational phrases.
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Notes
K’ichee’ is not monolithic and the dialects can diverge greatly. The data for this paper come from two variants: Santa Cruz del Quiché and Santa Lucía Utatlán (where they speak a dialect close to that of Nahualá). The two dialects agree on all the data presented here, where testable. If the data are not testable in one dialect due to a missing morpheme or phonological phenomenon, I indicate this in the text.
The disassociation of the featural and phonological contribution of morphemes, which we argue for here, is compatible with various models of the morpho-phonological component of the grammar. Focusing on prosodically conditioned allomorphy, it is compatible with global parallel approaches, like OT (Mascaró 2007; Mester 1994, among others), fully derivational treatments, like Embick (2010), as well as combinations of the two. We largely leave this fundamental question unanswered, though the analysis favors an OT approach due to the output optimizing effect of the alternations, which we will see.
I leave out transitive verbs derived by the suffix b’a’, which carry no status suffixes.
Here simple is a cover term including both completive and incompletive aspects. Dependent TAM includes the imperative as well as a verb form that involves the incorporation of various movement particles into the verbal stem. Finally, the perfect class consists of the analogue of the English perfect.
AP=anti-passive, INF=infinitive, INFL=inflection, INSTR=instrumental, IRR=irrealis, NEG=negation, PASS=passive, PL=plural, PRN=pronoun, PRT=particle, REP=reportative, SS=status suffix.
Historically, passives of root transitive verbs were formed with an infixal [h], so chap would become chahp in the passive. An intermediate sound change eliminated this infixation by changing CVhC syllables into CVVC syllables (Campbell 1977). The result is that now passives of root transitives are indicated by vowel length.
Some of the status suffixes are fused with aspectual information and are the sole bearers of this information, like the series of perfective status suffixes. There are also status suffixes, like -j, which are the sole bearers of important morphological information. A derived transitive verb without -j would be indistinguishable from a root transitive verb, neutralizing the key morphological distinction. Crucially, these other suffixes do not have a phrase-final distribution; they always appear, which is probably due to these functional considerations. Since they always appear whenever the verbal complex has the requisite feature set, unlike -ik and -o, this work does not focus on them.
The negative operator in K’ichee’ varies across dialects. In most places it is Man, but it is Na in Nahualá and Santa Lucía Utatlán. I will move freely between these variants in the text depending on where the data come from.
Not all dialects of K’ichee’ have the polarity particle k’ut. It is preserved in the variant spoken in Nahualá and Santa Lucía Utatlán.
Following Larsen (1988), I take aree taq to be a complementizer. One of its constituents is aree, which is the focus operator and which can be argued to sit in C∘. Also, Mayan languages have only one (or two) uninflected preposition and it is always locative, so I would not want to propose another without strong evidence.
One class of non-finite predicates in K’ichee’ carries the suffix -ik. It is distinct from the simple intransitive status suffix -ik, which I will continue to indicate with boldface. The infinitive suffix -ik is not a phrase-final suffix and so it always appears.
We might worry that, despite appearances, -umaal has a different syntax when taking a clausal argument. For instance, if it were a complementizer, there would be no syntax-prosody mismatch. There are two arguments against this position, both of which are based on structural uniformities. First, both of the language’s two locative prepositions are also complementizers, namely chi for finite clauses and pa with certain non-finite clauses. Crucially, neither of these cross-categorial complementizers shows agreement morphology like the relational noun -umaal. In fact, no unambiguous instance of C∘ in the language agrees with the clause it embeds. Second, reason questions involve pied-piping with inversion (Aissen 1996; Coon 2009), which is a property of questioned possessive DPs and relational noun phrases alone. Questioning other clausal argument positions involve specific constituent question words, not pied-piping with inversion. In all these ways, -umaal behaves like a relational noun heading its own case assigning projection, triggering agreement, not an instance of C∘.
A reviewer notes that the mismatches in Chomsky and Halle (1968) and Nespor and Vogel (1986) are cases where prosodic constituents are not syntactic constituents. While the K’ichee’ case is not of this sort, it is similar in that the observed prosody fails to conform to a syntactic generalization that holds elsewhere in the language. The non-constituent cases are an extreme version of this, where no satisfactory syntactic generalization is available.
Though here we are mostly concerned with whether phonology has access to syntactic phrase structure, a reviewer notes that English stress rules must have access to the category label of a lexical item, which is a type of syntactic information (Chomsky and Halle 1968 among many others).
This assumes that utterances cannot be recursively embedded. Ideally there would be a phonetic or phonological property linked to utterance boundaries that could be used to test for phrase-medial utterance boundaries. The problem is that I know of no such phonological process. Perhaps future work on boundary tones could provide a way to test for utterance boundaries, which I would predict do not track phrase-medial CP boundaries.
I would like to thank Judith Aissen, who noticed the same effect in the course of her work, for bringing this phenomenon to my attention.
Although we assume Non-Recursivity is active, we leave it out of the following examples until it is necessary in (65).
Even though we expect the recursive candidate in (61b) to be ruled out, it still shows the insufficiency of AlignR(CP,iP) since there is no right CP at the matrix clause to force the appearance of a prosodic boundary, which we see from candidate (61c).
Werle (2004) uses Complement- ω to account for various patterns of functional head cliticization in Bosnian/Serbian.
In light of the ma/man alternation, one might worry that the alternation between ta/taj might not be completely about phrasal location, but a combination of location in the phrase and following material. Note, though, that we see ta phrase-medially before words that start with both consonants and vowels, for instance, example (73a) versus (9).
Long vowels have two sources in K’ichee’ (Campbell 1977). The first are the long vowels present in Proto-K’ichean, which are preserved in those dialects of K’ichee’ that have long vowels. The second set of long vowels appear in closed syllables that historically have a CVhC shape source. K’ichee’ lost [h] syllable-internally, which was replaced with vowel length.
This constraint is in the spirit of Coincide constraints (Zoll 2004), which require heavy syllables, stress, etc. to occur in strong root positions.
For example, when the third person absolutive plural morpheme e is prefixed to a vowel initial root, a glottal stop is inserted. If the clitic alternations were a case of epenthesis, we would expect this unmarked consonant to appear.
I am very grateful to Junko Itô for pointing this out.
Although we do not build an analysis of [h]-epenthesis, a reviewer notes that the constraint requiring the epenthesis of laryngeal features would have to outrank No-Coda. We do not have to worry about phrase-medial clitics undergoing [h]-epenthesis because this process is a word minimality effect that only targets lexical, not functional, morphemes.
A reviewer notes that the pausal forms of Tiberian Hebrew present another case where intonational phrase prominence affects word level prosody (Dresher 1994, among others), though in this case stress is forced aways from its normal position at the right edge of the word.
Crucially, this presupposes that prominence grid marks are independent phonological objects. See Hyde (2007) for independent arguments that this is the case.
A reviewer wonders whether the phrase-final status suffixes, and not intonational phrase prominence, could bear the boundary tone in the input. This is possible as long as the tone can force stress onto the final syllable of the intonational phrase. Since ιP prominence and ιP boundary tones have the same distribution, it is not clear whether we can empirically distinguish associating a morpheme with an ιP prominence from associating it with an ιP boundary tone.
For those who do no like the constraint realize morpheme, and alternative analysis can be built using zero-allomorphs. If the status suffixes alternate with the zero-morph, then we can use the constraint Priorty (Mascaró 2007) to favor the visible allomorph unless this would cause violations of the higher ranking alignment constraints, in which case the zero-morph would be inserted. The problem with this analysis is we must stipulate that each phrase-final status suffix alternates with the zero-morph, and in the end, this lexical stipulation does not even reduce the number of constraints needed for the analysis.
Embick (2010) argues that this property of global parallel approaches to morphology is a defect. The reason is that allomorphy should be able to be conditioned by non-local phonological enviornments that do not, in fact, seem to condition allomorphy.
As suggested by one reviewer, we should also entertain the possibility that vocabulary insertion happens before prosodic structure is built, but that further operations could delete or alter morphemes to achieve the effect we see in K’ichee’. On one hand, if these are phonological operations like those proposed in this paper, then the effects of the morphosyntactic Vocabulary Insertion are completely masked. We would have two independent late insertion morphologies, each placing constraints on how feature bundles are associated with phonological exponents. On the other hand, if we allow further morphological operations to undo Vocabulary Insertion, we would be allowing Duke-of-York morphological derivations. While this does not mean that such an analysis is wrong, it is less preferred on theoretical grounds.
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Acknowledgements
Above all I am indebited to Jenniffer Estefany Lopez Vicente and the Can Pixab’aj family for their judgements. I am also greatly indebited to Telma Can Pixab’aj for her judgements and insights into the phenomena under discussion. Armin Mester deserves great thanks for all his help. I also need to thank Judith Aissen, Scott AnderBois, Ryan Bennett, Andrew Dowd, Nora England, Junko Itô, B’alam Mateo Toledo, Andrew Nevins, Jeremy O’Brien, Dave Teeple, and Matt Tucker for many productive discussions about these data and the analysis within. Four NLLT reviewers deserve credit for their constructive comments that improved this paper. Finally, I need to thank the CrISP Research Group at UCSC and an audience at NELS 40 for their input. That being said, the usual disclaimers apply. This work was supported by a travel grant from the UCSC Institute for Humanities Research, a grant from the UCSC linguistics department, and the Tanya Honig Fund for Linguistics Graduate Students.
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Henderson, R. Morphological alternations at the intonational phrase edge. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 30, 741–787 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-012-9170-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-012-9170-8