Atelier de Phonologie - Peter Nyhuis - 11 février

 

Peter Nyhuis (Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey)

 

Word parts such as stems and affixes often vary in form according to context. Just how speakers understand and use this variation is a central question both for morphology, focussed on structured variation across complex words, and for phonology, focussed on structured variation across sounds. Yet for decades, phonologists and morphologists have applied strikingly different approaches to this area of common overlap. Recent work (Nyhuis 2023) has proposed that these questions be addressed at the same time, arguing that phonological alternations have a paradigmatic character much like inflectional morphology: the phonological properties of a given word can predict the phonological properties of a morphologically related word. This work also demonstrates the feasibility of expressing such generalisations with schemas, which absorb the functions of rules or constraints in more familiar mainstream phonological theory while also expressing words’ morphological and semantic generalisations. It remains to be seen, however, whether schemas can address the full range of alternation types that phonologists are typically interested in — e.g. assimilation, deletion, insertion, and their (potentially opaque) interactions. In this talk, I draw out the implications of this approach, testing it against data from the Australian language Wubuy, to clarify what schemas can and cannot do, and in what respects they function differently from rules.