Location – Math and Science 5200

Title: Morpheme Ordering Happens in the Phonology

Abstract: The determination of the order of morphemes within words has traditionally been modeled using cyclic concatenation, the one-by-one attachment of affixal morphemes to the root, guided by morphosyntactic constituency via the “Mirror Principle” (Baker 1985). In this talk, I propose an alternative, parallel model of morpheme order that locates morpheme concatenation in the phonological component of the grammar. This model, couched within Parallel Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004), generates morpheme order through the interaction of two pieces of the grammar. The first is “articulated alignment”, which posits that every morpheme has its own alignment constraint (McCarthy & Prince 1993) which prefers it to be as close as possible to a specified edge. The second is the “Mirror Alignment Principle” (Zukoff 2023), a novel property of the phonology-morphology interface that dynamically determines the ranking of alignment constraints based on the morphosyntactic structure, in a way that derives the Mirror Principle. This approach allows for transparent interaction between phonological factors and morphological/morphosyntactic factors in a single input-output mapping. I will demonstrate that this approach is necessary to properly explain the generalizations underlying ordering alternations in two atypical morphological systems. The first is mobile affixation in Huave (Huavean; Kim 2008), where phonological and morphological properties interact to trigger prefix/suffix alternations. The second is root-and-pattern morphology in Arabic (Semitic; e.g. McCarthy 1979), where phonological and morphosyntactic properties interact to trigger prefix/infix alternations, which themselves inform alternations across far-flung components of the grammar. This adds to the body of research arguing for a parallel model of the phonology-morphology interface.