Stress and Allomorphy in Woleaian Reduplication

Woleaian shares the progressive and denotative affixes seen in other Trukic and Ponapeic languages of Western Micronesia (Harrison 1973, Sohn 1975). The progressive is invariably a prefix, and like in other Trukic languages (such as Chuukese, Puluwat, and Ulithian) it is bimoraic, with the second mora realized by geminating the initial consonant of the stem (fati → faf-fati ‘being angular’, fili → fif-fili ‘choosing’). The denotative marker, however, occurs unpredictably as a suffixed syllable (fati → fati-fati ‘be angular’, perase → perase-rase ‘scatter’) or initial gemination (fili → ffili ‘choose’, feragi → fferagi ‘spread’). In this paper, I argue that the shape and position of the denotative allomorphs can be predicted from the interaction of a morphological diacritic with the language's stress pattern. I show further that this same diacritic actually helps guarantee the size and shape of the progressive. Thus, while each reduplicative shape resembles a templatic operation, I will propose that the patterns of reduplication in Woleaian result from an emergent effect of general constraints on prosodic and segmental structure. I provide a theoretical analysis using Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993, McCarthy & Prince 1993a,b) to do so. The mapping of morphemes to prosodic constituents is something that I attribute to a general constraint requiring morpheme boundaries to foot boundaries. I will show that each reduplicative morpheme (including the geminate variant) respects such a requirement. The analysis has implications for the study of Woleaian in particular, for Micronesian languages at large, and for reduplication theory in general. For Woleaian, it offers a principled account for the denotative allomorphy, as well as for the absence of bare-consonant or monomoraic suffixes, and for the absence of bivocalic prefixes. For Micronesian languages, it stands as an example of languages diverging only by the drift of a small number of constraints. For reduplication theory, it strengthens the case for modeling reduplication as the emergence of unmarked prosody. This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, I present the data and describe the relevant phonological and reduplicative generalizations. In Section 3, I present an Optimality-Theoretic account that captures the denotative allomorphy with an abstract diacritic. In Section 4, I argue that assigning this diacritic to the progressive morpeme predicts its invariantly word-initial bimoraic