On the morphophonology of domains in Somali verbs and nouns

Abstract

Morphemes involved in the formation of Somali verbs and nouns are, in most instances, clearly individuated into categories corresponding to their role in word formation. Verbs contain a base, derivational extensions, inflectional affixes, and clitics that attach in a fixed order. Nouns also contain a base and derivational affixes, but little inflectional morphology. Indeed, both parts of speech have similar morphological templates in Somali, but the relationship between the language’s morphological domains and prosodic domains has only recently become a subject of detailed inquiry. We add to this ongoing trend by illustrating in this paper that there are close correlations between these domains in the language’s verbal and nominal systems that can be elucidated by morphophonological processes; certain processes occur only in a particular prosodic domain, and these process/domain combinations are similar in both the nominal and verbal systems. By establishing diagnostic phenomena attributable to phrase-level domains, this paper fills a gap between recent works focused only on defining prosodic characteristics of Somali words (Downing & Nilsson 2017; Green & Morrison 2016) and the accentual behavior of Somali clauses (Le Gac 2002, 2003a, b).

Conditions on complex exponence: A case study of the Somali subject marker

“…The fact that MRK can realize its effects, both segmentally and tonally, even on verbs in circumstances like these, leads to another possible extension of our analysis, namely the predictions that it makes concerning the composition of VIs and the status of H tone in Somali's verbal system. As pointed out by Green & Morrison (2018), several structural parallels exist between Somali nouns and verbs, such as the ability of the vast majority of derivational suffixes to attract H tone while subsequently witnessing loss of H on a stem, but also the presence of just a few suffixes that fail to do so.…”

“…The main difference between them is structural; these suffixes subcategorize for parsing within a prosodic word with the stem that they modify. Other affixal elements in the Somali, and notably inflectional suffixes and clitics, exhibit markedly distinct tonal and segmental characteristics, suggesting that they have different subcategorization requirements; see Green & Morrison (2018) for more discussion of their properties. The denominalizer VI for suffix -iyad is shown in ( 23).…”

“…Somali's DEFs are -ka and -ta in their basic form, with their initial consonant agreeing in k-series or t-series grammatical gender with the noun that they modify. Each is susceptible to predictable ''sandhi effects'' (Green & Morrison 2018) that depend on the consonant immediately preceding them: /-ka/ may be realized -ka, -ga, -ha, or -a, while /-ta/ may be realized -ta, -da, -dha, -sha. These alternations do not occur in other instances of affixation.…”

Moraic mismatches in Somali phonology

“…In viewing a Somali corpus, one might have the impression that Somali words are quite large. This is misleading, however, due in part to the synthetic nature of the language's lexicon, particularly its verbs, but also because the orthography treats oftentimes complex phrases as single written words (Green & Morrison 2018). Upon closer inspection, one finds an abundance of smaller words, with a robust minimality requirement on word size, as illustrated below.…”