Disyllabic hypocoristics in Chilean Spanish: a stratal OT analysis

Author:

King Matthew1

Affiliation:

1. PPLS, University of Edinburgh , Edinburgh , Scotland , UK

Abstract

Abstract Hypocoristics have received considerable interest from phonologists in recent decades, particularly within the Optimality-theoretic literature. While most of these analyses have been situated in parallelist OT, I claim that this architectural choice entails hidden complexities. It is cross-linguistically common for multiple hypocoristics to be formed from a single proper noun, e.g., Matthew → Matt/Matty. In this case, parallelist OT must resort to co-phonologies to avoid ranking paradoxes, which results in significant analytical complexity. By contrast, I argue in this paper that a stratal analysis is crucial for capturing multiple patterns of Hypocoristic Formation (HF) within a single architecture. I present here data of disyllabic hypocoristics from Standard Chilean Spanish. These hypocoristics are derived from the proper nouns by means of two separate anchoring sites: to the left edge of the full name, or to prominence in the full name, i.e., the tonic syllable. In addition, hypocoristics may be prosodically- or morphologically-driven: they may solely be formed by truncating the material of the proper noun, or, in the latter case, there may also be additional suffixal material provided. These data, therefore, lend themselves to a four-way categorisation. I show that this categorisation can be fully accounted for within a stratal architecture, and without the need for additional co-phonologies. Within the analysis, I locate each of the anchoring sites within the lexical phonology: edge-anchoring occurs at the stem level, along with syllabification and stress assignment, while prominence-anchoring occurs at the word level. In this way, the input to edge-anchoring at the stem level comprises a string of segments, while the input to prominence-anchoring at the word-level contains prosodic units up to the foot, which permits word-level HF to anchor to prominence. I further posit that prosodic- and morphologically-driven HF are caused through the passing of hypocoristic morphemes from the morpho-syntax to the phonology. Purely prosodic HF is triggered through a null or covert morpheme, while morphological HF triggered by an overt one. The hypocoristic morphemes themselves are stored as diacritics in the proper nouns’ lexical entries. Furthermore, the constraints that select the hypocoristic forms as optimal are sensitive to the presence of this hypocoristic morpheme, which is reflected in tableaux through indexing. When a hypocoristic morpheme is present in the input of a proper noun to a particular stratum, these highly-ranked indexed constraints select a corresponding hypocoristic form as optimal. If the hypocoristic morpheme is absent, these constraints do not assign violations, and the proper noun is instead (vacuously) found optimal. This analysis thus unifies two distinct patterns of HF in one phonological grammar through the inclusion of indexed-constraints and the serial derivation in a constraint-based architecture.

Publisher

Walter de Gruyter GmbH

Subject

Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics

同舟云学术

1.学者识别学者识别

2.学术分析学术分析

3.人才评估人才评估

"同舟云学术"是以全球学者为主线,采集、加工和组织学术论文而形成的新型学术文献查询和分析系统,可以对全球学者进行文献检索和人才价值评估。用户可以通过关注某些学科领域的顶尖人物而持续追踪该领域的学科进展和研究前沿。经过近期的数据扩容,当前同舟云学术共收录了国内外主流学术期刊6万余种,收集的期刊论文及会议论文总量共计约1.5亿篇,并以每天添加12000余篇中外论文的速度递增。我们也可以为用户提供个性化、定制化的学者数据。欢迎来电咨询!咨询电话:010-8811{复制后删除}0370

www.globalauthorid.com

TOP

Copyright © 2019-2024 北京同舟云网络信息技术有限公司
京公网安备11010802033243号  京ICP备18003416号-3