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Allomorph selection precedes phonology: Evidence from Yindjibarndi

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Abstract

Theories of the phonology-morphology interface can be differentiated by their claims regarding the timing of phonologically conditioned suppletive allomorphy (PCSA) and phonology. Some (e.g. Paster 2006; Embick 2010) argue that PCSA occurs in a morphological component of the grammar that precedes phonology; others (e.g. Kager 1996; Mascaró 2007; Smith 2015) argue that at least phonologically optimizing PCSA occurs in the phonological component of the grammar, in parallel with phonology. This paper discusses a case of apparently optimizing PCSA in Yindjibarndi (Pama-Nyungan, Wordick 1982), proposes an analysis in which suppletive allomorphy precedes phonology, and shows that the alternative – an analysis in which PCSA occurs in the phonological component of the grammar – should be dispreferred.

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Notes

  1. Abbreviations: abl ablative case marker; dir.all direct allative case marker; emp emphatic clitic; erg ergative case marker; inst instrumental case marker; loc locative case marker; obj objective case marker; one one ; top topic clitic; voc vocative suffix.

  2. One might wonder if /ŋ/ contributes a mora to shorter words, allowing for the satisfaction of some minimal length requirement. This seems unlikely: stress in Biri appears to be quantity-insensitive (Terrill 1998:13), so there is no reason to think that [ŋ] (or [l]) is moraic.

  3. This paper relies on the grammatical description, text collection, and lexicon from Wordick (1982). I am grateful to the Yindjibarndi people who made his work possible. For another text collection, mixed with Ngarluma, see von Brandenstein (1970). For more wordlists, see Bowern (2016) and Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre (2003). For work on the acoustics of Yindjibarndi nasal and stop consonants, see Tabain (1994) and Tabain and Butcher (1999).

  4. I use binary place features here because it allows me to easily make a distinction between coronal and non-coronal consonants, which will become relevant later in the paper.

  5. Wordick’s (1982) lexicon lists a total of 13 vowel-initial morphemes; seven are suffixes and the rest are English loans.

  6. Throughout this paper, numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in Wordick’s (1982) grammar.

  7. Note that assuming this architecture of the grammar predicts that suppletive allomorphy cannot be conditioned by derived phonology. There are no such cases in Yindjibarndi that I am aware of.

  8. An anonymous reviewer points out several words on the Yindjibarndi 50 Words site (https://50words.online/) that suggest cluster reduction from NC to C happens in other contexts, as well: /paŋgari/ ‘where are you going’ sounds like it is realized as [pagari], and /gurumau/ ‘goanna’ sounds like it is realized as [gurumat̪u]. Further investigation of a larger corpus of spoken Yindjibarndi is necessary to draw conclusions regarding additional contexts for nasal cluster reduction.

  9. I believe that *NCV(C)NC is shorthand for a phonetically motivated constraint that penalizes nasal-stop sequences that are followed by nasal or nasalized vowels. For motivation and formalization, as well as an analysis of the Yindjibarndi facts along these lines, see Stanton (2019).

  10. Presumably, these constraints interact with other constraints on segment sequencing, for example markedness constraints against vocalic sequences. Nash (2017) has shown, for example, that iCu sequences are avoided in many Pama-Nyungan languages.

  11. Wordick characterizes /k/ lenition as applying only to morpheme-initial segments, but I was unable to find an intervocalic [k] or [w] in any of the suffixes in his lexicon. In addition, it is potentially worth noting that there is a broader dispreference for intervocalic /k/s in the language. /k/ is a frequent consonant in Yindjibarndi: of the 7,604 consonants in Wordick’s lexicon (n = 2,273 words, entered by hand), 714 of these, or 9.39%, are /k/. (The only more frequent consonants are /m/, with 723 occurrences, and /r/, with 799.) If all consonants were equally probable in all environments, we might then expect 9.39% of all VCV sequences to involve a /k/. But what we find is that only 2.05% (66/3218) do. Thus although /k/ is frequent, it is underattested between vowels; the observed/expected ratio in this environment is 0.21 (=66/3218*.0939); see Pierrehumbert 1992 on O/E). It is likely, then, that (20) reflects a broader trend in the language.

  12. For another resource that could be used to calculate lexical statistics in Yindjibarndi, see Chirila (Bowern 2016).

  13. Recall that three Max constraints were actually employed in Sect. 3: Max, Max[stem], and Max[-sonorant]. Max[stem] is irrelevant because the only repairs I consider here affect the suffix. It does not matter whether the constraint I discuss is Max or Max[-sonorant]; all that is crucial for the present argument is that one of them dominates *LateCC.

  14. Note that, by virtue of using Harmonic Serialism, the analysis in Sect. 4.1 differs from one that would come from Wolf (2008), who uses Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (OT-CC, McCarthy 2007). All analytical points raised in this section also apply to an OT-CC-based analysis.

  15. The emphatic clitic is /pa/. We can tell that this is a different morpheme than /mpa/ because the /p/ of emphatic /pa/ lenites, but the /p/ of topicalization /mpa/ does not (compare /munti+mpa/ → [munti-pa] ‘truly-top’ to /munti+pa/ → [munti-wa] ‘truly-emp’ (Wordick 1982:225)). For clarity, I assume that /mpa/ is a non-leniting suffix, like /puɳu/ ‘user’ (Wordick 1982:116). I have not been able to find an example of the emphatic attaching to a [r]-final word to confirm that the morpheme-initial /p/ lenites there too, but this is what is expected given Wordick’s description.

  16. The associate editor notes that the analysis could also be made to work by assuming that final consonants are not parsed into feet, and that the subcategorization requirements of /ŋka/ require an immediately preceding foot boundary.

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Acknowledgements

My thanks to Adam Albright, Arto Anttila, Maria Gouskova, Kate Mooney, Donca Steriade, three anonymous reviewers, and audiences at NYU’s Morphbeer, LSA 93, and Berkeley’s Phorum for comments on and critical discussion of this material.

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    Juliet Stanton

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Stanton, J. Allomorph selection precedes phonology: Evidence from Yindjibarndi. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 40, 1317–1352 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-021-09531-0

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