One of the major attributes of autosegmental phonology is the possibility of reducing procedural techniques of morphological exponence to a generalised concept of concatenation. This research programme, which equates the triggers of non-concatenative processes with affixes consisting of incomplete autosegmental or prosodic representations, is called Generalised Non-linear Affixation in Bermú dez-Otero (2012). In this paper, we argue that the Generalised Non-linear Affixation analysis of segmental lengthening by mora affixation extends naturally to subtractive morphology. Defective (phonetically uninterpretable) integration of an affix mora into the prosodic structure of its base triggers deletion and shortening. We show that this approach derives all major types of quantitymanipulating morphology (vowel shortening, segmental subtraction and vowellength polarity), and thus demonstrate that Generalised Non-linear Affixation extends fully to subtractive morphology, which has been seen as the ultimate problem for a concatenative reanalysis (Anderson 1992).
Plurals in the native stratum of German nouns exhibit a complex interlacing of arbitrary lexical classes and virtually exceptionless generalizations across them. Thus while it is not fully predictable phonologically or semantically which suffix allomorph a plural noun takes and whether it undergoes umlaut (vowel fronting), specific suffixes consistently trigger or block umlaut (Augst 1979; Wurzel 1998; Wunderlich 1999), and all plural forms obey a fixed prosodic template (Wiese 1996b, 2009). This combination of regular and irregular has given rise to the claim that German noun plurals defy a morpheme-based analysis and require global paradigm structure conditions (
We propose a syntactic approach to apparent blocking effects in the realization of definiteness marking in the Scandinavian languages. The claim is that the differences in definiteness marking can be attributed to a requirement that a definiteness feature ([DEF], a property of N) must be located at the left edge of the DP phase in order to be PIC-accessible for probes outside of the DP. As a result, [DEF] can be spelled out on N if N is the only element within DP and [DEF] is therefore part of DP’s edge domain (giving rise to suffixal marking). In contrast, the presence of an (overt) adjectival modifier (at the left edge of DP) requires feature movement of [DEF] to D, which is then realized as a prenominal article (with additional spell-out of the lower copy of [DEF] in Swedish). The paper also addresses the (slightly different) behavior of definiteness marking in the context of relative clauses and certain issues pertaining to the interpretation of the different strategies.
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