On the morphophonology of domains in Somali verbs and nouns

Abstract

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).