Seminar in Morphology

This course is an advanced graduate seminar on morphological theory, focusing on the topics of nonsuppletive allomorphy and morpheme-specific phonology. Nonsuppletive allomorphy raises interesting questions for morphological theory. One major issue that any account must face is the distinction itself between suppletive and nonsuppletive allomorphy (e.g. "go/went" vs. "sing/sang" in English). The distinction is notoriously difficult to make, which has lead some to get rid of the distinction, at least to some extent, by assimilating nonsuppletive allomorphy to suppletive allomorphy, i.e. in all cases of allomorphy, the allomorphs of a morpheme do not have a common underlying form and must be listed separately. If the distinction is real, however, that raises the question of what the right analysis is. If nonsuppletive allomorphs of a morpheme all have the same underlying form, what types of processes derive the surface forms? In what ways can these processes be characterized as phonological? Can specific morphemes trigger specific phonological processes? Can these triggering effects instead be the result of abstract phonological representations? In this seminar, we'll try to answer these questions by discussing and comparing recent approaches to morpheme-specific phonological phenomena. The topics covered will include recent approaches to infixation, Cophonologies by Phase, Stratal Phonology, Strict CV Phonology, and morphological colors.