Morphological Encoding and the Association Conventions

Abstract

This chapter will deal with certain issues that involve the interaction of morphology and phonology. Tone is of particular interest in this regard because of the degree of independence it enjoys in phonological representations: tone can constitute an entire morpheme, the tone of one morpheme can be associated with a segment in another morpheme, etc. But in spite of this independence, tonal associations are by and large predictable in many languages. In characterizing this predictability, there are two basic considerations to be taken into account: (1) the morphological structure of the string, (2) the phonological conventions for linking tones to segments. These considerations are the topic of this chapter.