The Division of Labour Between Morphology and Phonology

[ Via LINGUIST List, belatedly. ]

The Divison of Labour between Morphology and Phonology
January 16-17, 2009
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Contact: Jochen Trommer
Call Deadline: October 30, 2008

Call for Papers

For many grammatical processes it remains highly controversial whether they are primarily phonological or morphological in nature. A notorious case is reduplication which is analyzed as a basically phonological phenomenon in most optimality-theoretic analysis (McCarthy & Prince, 1994, 1995), but treated as morphological readjustment by representation-based frameworks (Raimy, 2000; Nevins, 2005; Frampton, in press). Under closer inspection, both types of approach employ phonological and morphological mechanisms although to different degrees and in different modes of interaction. The crucial problem is therefore not so much an all-or-nothing assignment of work to phonology or morphology, but the division of labour. This point becomes even clearer in the approach of Inkelas and Zoll (2006) where the copying part of most reduplication processes is purely morphological while templatic effects are the result of (morphologically conditioned) phonology.

The goal of this workshop is to discuss the division of labour among morphology and phonology in any relevant grammatical phenomena. We invite contributions in any grammatical framework which address this problem under theoretical or empirical aspects, and also welcome presentations on typological and diachronic aspects. Relevant phenomena include, but are not restricted to:

– Allomorphy: Phonologically triggered suppletive allomorphy has been analyzed as phonological selection of alternants provided by morphology (Kager, 1996; Joan Mascaró, 1996; Rubach & Booij,2001) or as morphological subcategorization which has access to phonological information (Paster, 2005a; see also Bye, 2006).

– Morpheme-specific Alternations: Captured recently by phonological constraints (Pater, to appear) or grammars (Inkelas & Zoll, 2006)

– Infixation: reduced to phonological metathesis in McCarthy & Prince (1993), but claimed to be morphological in Yu (2003)

– Morphological Blocking: usually assumed to be purely morphological, but partially or entirely reimplemented by phonological mechanisms in Kurisu (2001) and Müller (2007)

– Mutation and Umlaut: Competing phonological (Wolf, 2006; Svenonius 2006), morphological (Green, 2003) and mixed (Wiese, 1996) analyses

– Affix order: Affix order seems to be generally insensitive to phonology (Paster, 2005a), but Noyer (1994) discusses a case where affixal orientation seems to be governed by phonology

The workshop will take place as a single joint event together with the fourth meeting of the Network Core Mechanisms of Exponence. Presentations will be alloted 40 minutes (including discussion).

Invited Speakers
-Geert Booij
-Chris Golston
-Sharon Inkelas
-Andrew Nevins

Organization
-Jochen Trommer
-Marc van Oostendorp
-Doreen Georgi

Abstract Submission:

Abstracts must be anonymous, at most one page long (with an optional second page for data and references), and should be sent as a pdf attachment to: doreengeorgi@gmx.de

Deadline for Abstracts: October 30
Notification of Acceptance: November 15

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