Speaker: Snejana Iovtcheva
Title: Paradigm Uniformity in the Bulgarian vowel-zero alternation
Date/Time: Monday, Mar 10, 5p (Note special time)
Location: 32-D461 (Note special room)
This paper proposes an analysis of the vowel-zero alternation in Standard Bulgarian using Output-to-Output (OO) correspondence. In particular, the paper proposes that the language has a general markedness M constraint that targets non-round mid-vowels [e/ә] in open/light medial syllables triggering a systematic Syncope in the inflectional <no.kәt, *nokә.t-i/nokt-i> and derivational <*nokә.t-ov/nokt-ov, nokәt.-če> morphology of the language. This M constraint is then shown to interact systematically with the phonotactics of the language producing expected exceptions to the Syncope process. More crucially, it is also shown that the M constraint interacts with symmetrical paradigm-internal (McCarthy 2005) Output-to-Output faithfulness F constraints, producing some unexpected exceptions such as in the case of masculine-inflected en-derived adjectives
and plural-inflected ec-derived nouns <begl-e.c-i>. Based on an analysis of the inflectional paradigm patterns, the paper claims that under the condition of uneven suffixal distribution, the under-application of the Syncope process in forms with more than one deletion site – as in <nokә.t-en/*nokt-en, nokәt.-n-a/*nokә.te-n-a> – is systematically controlled by intra-paradigmatic pressure for uniformity (Kenstowicz 1996), including majority-rules effects (McCarthy 2005).
The claim of paradigm-internal correspondence is further supported by the fact that while the Syncope fails to apply in certain inflectional forms, it is regular throughout the derivational morphology. Similar asymmetry between derivational and inflectional morphology is further observed in other phonological processes in the language, such as Palatalization.
Additional treatment of the post-positioned vowel-initial definite article
and the specific vowel-initial numeral morpheme <(dva) nokә.t-a> provide a nice contrast that serves to demonstrate that while certain morpho-syntactic dependencies in the Bulgarian morphology obey asymmetric base-derivative dependencies (Benua 1997), the inflectional morphology can only be treated uniformly if we assume symmetric paradigm-internal dependencies.