Metaphony as Morpheme Realization, Not Vowel Harmony
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Abstract
The present paper is an analysis of metaphony phenomena that occur in the Lena dialect of Spanish (Hualde, 1989) and the Treia dialect of Italian (Papa, 1981). Metaphony is a change in the height of a stem vowel triggered by a suffix vowel. Previous accounts of metaphony phenomena have treated metaphony as an example of vowel harmony. However, metaphony phenomena often differ from harmony phenomena in several ways. Vowel harmony phenomena are either stem-controlled or dominant-recessive (Bakovic, 2000). Stem-controlled harmony involves a phonological characteristic of a stem inducing a phonological change in an affix. However, metaphony is the occurrence of an affix inducing a change in a stem. Thus, metaphony is not stem-controlled. In dominant-recessive harmony, a dominant-feature-valued vowel triggers a change in the recessive vowels in the morpheme, and sometimes across morphemes. In Lena, however, the vowel change occurs only across a morpheme boundary and only one vowel in each stem is targeted. Furthermore, the targeted vowel is the stressed stem vowel; thus, a paradox arises in that the stressed vowel would have to be considered recessive. Therefore, metaphony phenomena as witnessed in Lena are not cases of dominantrecessive harmony. In the present analysis, metaphony is discussed as a case of double morphemic exponence (similar to German umlaut), in which the input suffix morpheme is phonologically realized both as a suffix and as a change in the stem. Double morphemic exponence is accounted for by Kurisu (2001), using Realizational Morphology Theory (RMT), which is framed within Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2002). An important constraint in RMT is Realize Morpheme, which requires the phonological realization of a morpheme. In the present analysis, Realize Morpheme is highly-ranked. Within RMT, double morphemic exponence is accounted for using Sympathy Theory (McCarthy, 1999a). The selector constraint is a low-ranking constraint which requires that the output phonological word include only the stem, and not the affix. Satisfaction of this selector constraint causes the suffix to be invisible. Thus, in order to satisfy high-ranking Realize Morpheme, a change in the stem vowel occurs. Faithfulness to the change in stem vowel is enforced by Faith _ O constraints. The change in the stem vowel surfaces because the winning candidate satisfies these Faith _ O constraints. The suffix vowel also surfaces because the winning candidate satisfies Max IO, a constraint that requires every input segment to have a correspondent segment in the output. In summary, the present analysis accounts for metaphony not as a case of vowel harmony but as a case morphological opacity in the form of double morphemic exponence.
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