Moraic preservation and equivalence in Gújjolaay Eegimaa perfective reduplication

Abstract

The role of syllable weight in Gújjolaay Eegimaa, an Atlantic language spoken in south-western Senegal, is evidenced by reduplicative patterns in the perfective stem, where we witness a difference in the surface representation of verb roots with underlying voiced obstruents from those with underlying voiceless obstruents. We argue that voiced plosives are weight bearing and therefore considered as moraic when in coda position in this language. We attribute the triggering of the gemination in the reduplicative perfective with roots having final voiced plosives to compensatory lengthening in order to make up for the loss of a mora as motivated by Hayes (1989). Gemination, rather than vowel lengthening, occurs because, as stated by de Chene and Anderson (1979) compensatory lengthening of vowels only occurs in a language where vowel length is contrastive. In this paper, we show evidence to support the proposition that there are no long vowels in this variety of Eegimaa, and therefore gemination (which is a contrastive feature in the language) is the repair strategy employed to compensate for the loss of a mora. Through a description of the weight-related processes observed in perfective reduplication in Eegimaa, we will detail the moraic analysis of the various patterns and discuss general phonological implications.