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Somali wordhood and its relationship to prosodic structure

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Abstract

Previous “one tone per word” analyses of Somali wordhood fall short in a number of ways due to the morphological and prosodic complexity of the language. While the presence of a single accentual high tone is generally a good diagnostic for prosodic wordhood in the language, it is a poor predictor of grammatical wordhood. In this paper, we aim to refine the criteria needed to define both. We explore the culminative role played by tonal accent in the formation of prosodic words and the contributions of morphosyntactic and phonological phenomena in defining larger phrases that are sometimes considered single words in the language. We explore positive and negative correlations between prosodic and grammatical wordhood, and in doing so, we find that the differing accentual behavior of Somali words depends largely on the prosodic structure of their constituent morphemes and the position of these morphemes on a wordhood cline. We illustrate that while each maximal prosodic word in the language exhibits one tone, a minimal prosodic word is better defined in terms of its accentual properties. In addition, while prosodic and grammatical wordhood often align with one another, grammatical wordhood cannot be unambiguously defined based on tone or accent location.

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Notes

  1. The foot category is also commonly referred to as a domain, as seen in a variety of recent works, including Pearce (2006), Bennett (2012), Elfner (2012), Green (2010), and Martínez-Paricio (2013).

  2. On occasion, Saeed and Hyman simply refer to the “word,” but we assume that their intent is to make reference more specifically to a PWd.

  3. In Sect. 5, we also discuss ways in which phrasal accents, boundary tones, and some clitics have an overriding effect on the realization of the surface tonal pattern of a word or phrase.

  4. Somali has two closely related possessive determiners, one of which is generally used to express inalienable possession, the other for alienable possession. The inalienable possessive determiners are the basic form; the alienable possessive determiner contains an additional definite determiner. The forms given in (5) are alienable possessive determiners; they function nearly identically to their inalienable counterparts from a tonal perspective.

  5. Somali exhibits a number of pluralization strategies. These include pluralization by different types of suffixation (a–j), by partial reduplication (9k–n), by tonal accent shift alone (9o–p). Some borrowings retain Arabic broken pluralization: kúrsi ‘chair’ → kuraasí ‘chairs.’ Vowel alternations, consonant epenthesis, and syllable reduction are also commonly encountered in Somali word formation, all of which can be observed in various examples in (9). Stem-final -e and -o alternate with -a, -i, or -u, depending on the context; Somali mid vowels are understood to be underspecified and become licensed as fully-specified vowels upon affixation. Syllable reduction is metrically-conditioned and morphologically-triggered; however, it is subject to phonotactic restrictions.

  6. The Verb Complex is a fairly strict, templatic phrase-like construct in Somali that some have argued is like a miniature mapping of the sentence (Gebert 1986; Puglielli 1981). The Verb Complex contains slots for object pronoun clitics, adpositions, and deictic markers, followed by the verb itself.

  7. A reviewer asks for additional information as to the status of the plural morpheme as a prosodic word. Pluralization in Somali is a derivational process. As a result, the behavior of plural morphemes (of which Somali has several) differs markedly from inflectional affixation. That is, derivational morphemes tend to be accentual and prosodically-independent while inflectional morphemes are not.

  8. Constructions of this type are unique in that they are formed exclusively by morphemes located within the Verb Complex. We mentioned above that the Verb Complex is a templatic domain containing object pronouns, adpositions, deictic markers, and the verb itself. Saeed (1994, 1996, 1999:163) has argued that this domain is not syntactically equivalent to a verb phrase. However, we and others have observed that the Verb Complex is arguably phrase-like; it has well-defined internal morphosyntactic structure, and its boundaries delineate a complete intonation phrase (Le Gac 2003a, 2003b).

  9. An example of such interruptability can be seen in the sentence below where a deictic intervenes between the pronoun/adposition cluster and the verb:

    Annaga

    baa

    laynoo

    soo

    ordayay

    anna=k-a

    baa

    la-na=u

    soo

    orod-ay-Ø-ay

    we(exc.)=K-DEF

    FOC

    NSP-us=to

    DEIC

    run-PROG-3SG-PST

    ‘Someone was running toward us.’

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank members in the audience at ACAL 45 for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this work. We also are grateful to our Somali consultants for their time and patience. This material is based upon work supported, in whole or in part, with funding from the United States Government. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Maryland, College Park and/or any agency or entity of the United States Government.

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  1. University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language, 7005 52nd Avenue, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Christopher R. Green & Michelle E. Morrison

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  1. Christopher R. Green
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Correspondence to Christopher R. Green.

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Green, C.R., Morrison, M.E. Somali wordhood and its relationship to prosodic structure. Morphology 26, 3–32 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-015-9268-x

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