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Morphosyntax–phonology mismatches in Muskogee

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2021

Peter Ara Guekguezian*
Affiliation:
University of Rochester

Abstract

The mismatching of morphosyntactic and phonological domains inside words provides a testing ground for models of the morphosyntax–phonology interface. This paper describes a pattern of morphosyntax–phonology mismatches in Muskogee. Muskogee verbs are spelled out at two phases, vP and CP, resulting in two phonological domains, which this paper models as ω-recursion. The vP phase and ωmin are mismatched: either vP-phase material is parsed outside ωmin – an undermatch – or CP-phase material is parsed inside ωmin – an overmatch. The mismatch pattern requires a parallel model of morphosyntax–phonology mapping to distinguish mismatches using gradient Align constraints, rather than categorial Match constraints. Additionally, a phase-based model must allow earlier cycles to be altered in later cycles, ruling out strict phase inalterability in phonology, while a Stratal OT analysis must send a word's first phase through the stem-level phonology, regardless of its ultimate phasal structure.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to acknowledge Jack Martin for his superb grammar of Muskogee and his answers to my many questions about Muskogee, and Kimberly Johnson for discussion of her own fieldwork on Muskogee. I would also like to thank Joyce McDonough, for focusing my generalisations on prosodic structure in Muskogee, Karen Jesney, for poring over both earlier stages of this work and a recent draft, and Hossep Dolatian, for commenting on a previous draft. I further appreciate the input on earlier versions of this work from the Departments of Linguistics at the University of Rochester and the University of Southern California, and the audiences at AMP 2016, the 2017 LSA Annual Meeting and MoMOT 2018. I thank an associate editor and three anonymous reviewers for Phonology. Lastly and most importantly, thank you to all the Muskogee speakers who have generously provided all the data in this paper via Jack Martin's grammar. Any errors in the work are solely my own.

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