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A formal account of morphological epenthesis in Serbo-Croatian

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Abstract

This article analyzes stem allomorphy in Serbo-Croatian neuter noun inflection as morphological epenthesis. I demonstrate that consonant insertion in the inflection of Serbo-Croatian neuter nouns is a predictable, morphologically conditioned process, rather than an artifact of listed stem allomorphy. Furthermore, the process is not phonologically optimizing, and does not depend on phonological conditions such as vowel hiatus or illicit phonotactic structure. The present analysis includes the process in a wider, algorithmic interpretation of nominal inflection as logical transductions on strings, using Boolean Monadic Recursive Schemes (BMRSs).

BMRSs are appropriate for modeling morphological processes, as they can intensionally represent morphological substance and generalizations, much like theories of realizational morphology do, while retaining the computationally restrictive nature of such processes. A logical description is therefore offered of Serbo-Croatian neuter noun inflection, including the processes of stem-final consonant insertion and suffix-initial vowel fronting. The work presented here bears wider implications about the nature of morphophonological processes, and the interfaces of morphology with phonology and syntax.

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Notes

  1. The language is here referred to, and treated as, one (pluricentric) language, following the Declaration on the Common Language (http://jezicinacionalizmi.com/deklaracija/).

  2. These consonants are termed palatal in all traditional Serbo-Croatian literature (e.g. Stevanović, 1970), even though they do not all have a strictly palatal place of articulation. I assume that, in terms of the morphophonological effect of fronting, the category of posterior coronal consonants expands to include all affricates in the language; in other words, ʦ patterns with all other affricates, which are C[cor, -ant] (ʧ, ʤ, ʨ, ʥ), and triggers vowel fronting in o-initial suffixes.

  3. Collective forms are in competition with the regular plurals, and most often win in such a way that regular plurals rarely appear as output forms. The formalization of this process is outside the bounds of this article; the regular neuter plurals are modeled as they apply to the wider group of neuter nouns in Serbo-Croatian.

  4. The problem is avoided altogether if class membership assignment in Serbo-Croatian is understood to be a predictable process, rather than lexically listed information. This is the claim in Petrovic (2022), and is briefly discussed in Sect. 4 below.

  5. I.e. not j, ʎ, ɲ, ʧ, ʤ, ʨ, ʥ, ʃ, ʒ, or ʦ-final; see Sect. 2.

  6. Historically, this t in Serbo-Croatian is derived from an underlying t; in Proto-Slavic, the t was present in an entire inflectional paradigm of neuter nouns (denoting young beings, like tele ‘calf’), including the nominative singular (Matasović, 2008: 206). Therefore, morphological t-epenthesis in modern Serbo-Croatian is a case of diachronic rule inversion (Vennemann, 1972) and generalization to a wider class of nouns (all neuter e-final stems, with no reference to the semantic criterion).

  7. Broselow (1984) observes similar phenomena in Hebrew, Temiar, Cree, French, and Maori. In all of these languages, t is inserted as a default, unmarked consonant, to repair specific morphological structures.

  8. The only exception is normally considered to be total reduplication – finite memory is insufficient to model a productive process which assumes copying material of unbounded size. For a modeling of reduplication with 2-way finite-state transducers, see Dolatian and Heinz (2020).

  9. The input structures are assumed to come from the syntax; this is further explained in Sect. 4.

  10. Standard logical conjunction could also be used (i.e., [dat/loc sg]i(x) ∧ [sg]i(s(x))), as it is equally expressive (Chandlee & Jardine, 2021; Moschovakis, 2019); here I choose to follow the ‘if... then... else...’ syntax consistently.

  11. The terms in (25) can be reordered in any way; this is equally expressive as standard logical disjunction.

  12. In an alternative approach, the initial vowel of the [ins sg] and the [nom/acc/voc sg] suffixes is always o, which then gets fronted to e after FCs. I develop that account in Sect. 4, where I introduce additional levels to the architecture of the morphological module.

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Mark Aronoff, Jeffrey Heinz, John F. Bailyn and Greville Corbett for the very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I am also grateful to the audiences at FDSL 13, SLS 13, SYNC 20, and the members of the Rutgers/Stony Brook MathLing Reading Group for the extremely productive discussions and useful feedback.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, Stony Brook University, 100 Nicolls Road, Stony Brook, NY, 11794, USA

    Andrija Petrovic

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Petrovic, A. A formal account of morphological epenthesis in Serbo-Croatian. Morphology 33, 335–359 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-023-09412-9

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