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Donca Steriade Colloquium

Donca Steriade
MIT

Cycle and pseudo-cycle in Romanian

Friday, November 30, 3:30 pm, Machmer W-24

Abstract

Romanian phonology is subject to inflection dependence, a systematic restriction on phonological alternations. Inflection dependence means that segmental alternations are permitted in the derivatives of a lexeme only if certain inflected forms of that lexeme, its inflectional bases (Albright 2002), independently display the alternation. The study documents this pervasive constraint on alternations and proposes an analysis for it, based on a modified variant of Lexical Conservatism (Steriade 1999b).

The broader significance of inflection dependence is the need to allow access in phonological computations to a broader class of lexically related, derived lexical items relative to what the phonological cycle (Chomsky et al. 1956) and its descendants permit. I discuss the difference between inflection dependence and the phonological cycle and propose a mechanism that reduces the formal differences between them to rankings of correspondence and phonotactics.

References

Albright, Adam. 2002. The identification of bases in morphological paradigms, UCLA PhD thesis.

Chomsky, Noam, Morris Halle and Fred Lukoff. 1956. On accent and juncture in English. In: For Roman Jakobson, 65-80. The Hague: Mouton.

Steriade, Donca. 1999b. Lexical conservatism in French adjectival liaison, in B. Bullock, M. Authier, and L, Reed, eds., Proceedings of LSRL 25, Benjamins, pp 243-271