SANDE COLLOQUIUM

On Tuesday, January 31st, Hannah Sande (UC Berkeley) will be giving a colloquium at 1:30pm in Hum 1, Room 210. Her talk is entitled “Modeling the morphology/phonology interface: Evidence from process morphology in Guébie”, and the abstract is below.

Work on the relationship between morphology and phonology has long been split between two views: 1) phonological phenomena occur due to the concatenation of underlying items, or 2) phonological phenomena occur due to the application of some process (Hockett, 1954; Anderson, 1992).

Here I present novel data from Guébie, an endangered Kru language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire, which bears on the crucial question of whether morphology involves item arrangement or processes. I describe two distinct phenomena in Guébie–scalar tone shift and phonologically determined agreement–which demonstrate that not all morphology involves affixation (contra Trommer and Zimmermann, 2014; Zimmermann 2016). I present a unified analysis of these two phenomena, in which morphological processes are modeled with cophonologies (Ito and Mester, 1995; Anttila, 2002; Inkelas and Zoll, 2005) that can apply in phrasal as well as in lexical contexts (cf. McPherson 2014, McPherson and Heath 2016).