Yucatec Maya Vowel Alternations. Arguments for Syntagmatic Identity and Positional Faithfulness

نویسنده

  • Martin Krämer
چکیده

In this paper, I will give a detailed account of vowel harmony and vowel dissimilation in Yucatec Maya. These phenomena provide insights for the treatment of assimilation in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993), as well as for the organisation of phonological features. The theoretical topics to be dealt with are (i.) an adequate formalisation of phonological feature assimilation within Correspondence Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1995), and (ii.) an account of morpheme-specific alternations within this framework. I will argue that harmony, or assimilation in general, surfaces due to a Faithfulness constraint family, Syntagmatic Identity, which establishes a correspondence relation between segmental or prosodic entities of the same type within one representation. Idiosyncratic alternations will be analysed with reliance on featural underspecification of underlying forms. Effects which were traditionally attributed to different rules on different levels of derivation are accounted for within the parallelist model of Correspondence Theory by constraint interaction, and without assumptions like serialist candidate evaluations (which were proposed by Benua 1997, Kiparsky 1999, and many others).

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تاریخ انتشار 2000