LING Colloquium: Hannah Sande (Georgetown)

Hannah Sande (Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Georgetown)

Cophonologies by Phase: Phases as the domain of phonological evaluation

Abstract: Phonological alternations can apply to words, but can also apply to sub-word or multi-word domains. In this talk I argue that with evidence from three case studies that application of morphology and phonology takes place at syntactic phase boundaries, which are in some cases smaller than a phonological word, and in some cases span multiple words. I introduce the Cophonologies by Phase model (Sande and Jenks, 2018; Sande, 2019), which relies on two main assumptions: 1) an expanded notion of vocabulary items in a Distributed Morphology approach, where morphosyntactic feature bundles can be associated with partial phonological constraint rerankings (or re-weightings), in addition to being associated with a (supra)segmental phonological form, and 2) phase-based spell-out and application of phonology. This framework is shown to account for a wide range of phenomena, including morpheme-specific phonological effects that can affect words, multiple words, sub-word domains, and cumulative morpheme-specific phonological effects within a phase domain. The model makes specific predictions about boundaries that we do not expect morpheme-specific phonological alternations to cross. The three primary case studies considered come from Kuria (Bantu), Guébie (Kru), and Amuzgo (Oto-Manguean), and each phenomenon examined is shown to be quite common across languages. I argue that with morpheme-specific phonology and phonological evaluation at phase boundaries, Cophonologies by Phase can account for the attested range of domains of morphologically specific phonological processes in a unified but restricted way.