<OT> New Posting: ROA-631

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 631-1003

Reduplication as Affixation in Paiwan

Meylysa Tseng <meylysa at hotmail.com>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=631


Abstract:
In this thesis I investigate the morphological structure
of reduplication in Northern Paiwan, a Formosan language
of Southern Taiwan.  The main objective is to use Optimality
Theory (OT), as first formulated by Prince and Smolensky
(1993), to show that reduplication can be considered the
same as affixation.  This is in support of Marantz (1982).


I do this by first classifying reduplication into two classes:
prefixing (Ca reduplication or CaRED) and suffixing (root
reduplication or RtRED).  Factors determining these classes
are phonological structure and semantics.  Phonologically,
RtRED is dimoraic and copies all of its segments from the
stem.  CaRED, on the other hand, is monomoraic with the
vowel invariably surfacing as a.  I find that the more prototypic
al and commonly used reduplication, RtRED, also has the
more prototypical semantic functions of reduplication. 
CaRED, on the contrary, has more specialized meanings with
a narrower distribution.


Next, I show that reduplication and affixation follow the
same constraints.  Thus, suffixal reduplicants follow the
same constraints as suffixes and prefixal reduplicants follow
the same constraints as prefixes.  In addition, suffixes
and prefixes can also follow constraints previously restricted
to the domain of reduplication.


One of the conclusions that come forth from the analysis
is that templates are needed to describe Paiwan root reduplicatio
n.  This is in opposition to recent efforts by McCarthy
(1997), Gafos (1998) and Spaelti (1999) to eliminate template
constraints.


My analysis also needs to consider the word-final coda to
be extraprosodic.  To do so, following Harris and Gussmann
(1998), word final codas are reanalyzed as onsets.  In this
way, word-final codas will not violate No-Coda.  In addition,
I look at Max-BR and how it has no important role in analyses
that require templates.  I also choose to work in Spaelti's
(1999) lexical-surface (LS) framework, as opposed to McCarthy
and Prince's (1995a) input-base-reduplicant (IBR) framework.
I motivate this by showing that the LS interface will solve
all of the problems created by the IBR interface.


With this analysis arises one complete OT grammar which
can be used to analyze both reduplicants and affixes.  In
addition, included in the Appendix is a successful application
of this grammar to Thao, another Formosan language.  This
analysis shows how the grammar can handle word-internal
codas and consonant clusters, both of which are abundant
in Thao and missing in Paiwan.

Comments: 
Keywords: reduplication, Paiwan, austronesian, formosan, affixation, foot
Areas: Morphology,Phonology,Semantics,Formal Analysis
Type: Masters Dissertation

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=631