Please note: this Monday, Phonology Circle will meet at a special place and time, in order to allow participants to attend Kiparsky’s talk at Harvard at 4.
Time: Monday 4/13, 1:30-3:30pm
Location: 32-D461
Speaker: Bronwyn M. Bjorkman
Title: Uniform Exponence and Reduplication: Evidence from Kinande
In this talk I argue that verbal reduplication in Kinande (a Central Bantu language spoken in parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) is subject to constraints enforcing identity between reduplicants of a single root.
Kinande verbal reduplication is typical for a Bantu language: a bisyllabic reduplicant is prefixed to the verbal stem (the root plus any suffixes), and means ‘quickly’ or ‘iteratively’. What is unique about the Kinande system, however, is that reduplication of morphologically complex bases is regulated by a Morpheme Integrity Constraint (MIC, Mutaka and Hyman 1990), which prohibits partial morpheme-copying: individual morphemes must be reduplicated in their entirety or not at all.
What is interesting is the form that reduplicants of morphologically complex verbs take in order to avoid violating the MIC (1b-d): such reduplicants are identical to each other and to the reduplicant of the bare, unsuffixed verb stem (1a):
(1) a. eri-huk-a to cook eri-huka-huk-a b. eri-huk-w-a to be cooked eri-huka-huk-w-a or eri-hukwa-huk-w-a c. eri-huk-ir-a to cook for eri-huka-huk-ir-a (*eri-huki-huk-ir-a) d. mó-tw-á-huk-ire we cooked (yes.) mó-tw-á-huka-huk-ire (*mó-tw-á-huki-huk-ire) The data in (1) present a challenge for a correspondence-based approach to reduplication (McCarthy and Prince, 1995): in (1b-c) we see that the reduplicant can correspond to a non-contiguous substring of the Base, and in (1d) the reduplicant contains a final [a] that is not present in the base at all.
To account for these data, I propose that Kinande reduplicants are subject to Output-Output (OO) constraints enforcing faithfulness between reduplicative morphemes themselves, not only between morphologically related whole words. Within a set of verbs sharing the same root, reduplicants are thus subject to two separate and sometimes divergent correspondence requirements: they are required by standard Base-Reduplicant (BR) faithfulness to be identical to their linearly adjacent base, but they are also required by OO constraints to be identical to all other reduplicants within the root-defined set (RED-Uniformity). When BR and OO faithfulness requirements compete, the result is optionality, as in (1b). When the MIC rules out the BR faithful candidate, as in (1c-d), the uniform reduplicant is the only grammatical option.