Speaker: Sharon Rose (UCSD)
Title: Tone Distribution and Affix Order in Moro
Time: Friday, May 8th, 2009, 3.30pm-5pm
Place: 32-155 ***Please note special place***
This talk investigates two separate, but related phenomena in the verbal
morphology of Moro: tone distribution and the order of object markers.
Moro is a Kordofanian language spoken in Sudan; the research is part of
the Moro Language Project at UCSD.The interaction between tone and syllable weight has primarily focused on
the distribution of contour tones. In Moro verb roots, high tone is
distributed according to syllable size or weight. Heavy syllables
preferentially bear high tone, whereas light onsetless syllables cannot
bear high tone. I argue in favor of prominence constraints as in
onset-sensitive stress systems (Gordon 2005) rather than
extraprosodicity, an approach which fails to explain the onsetless
syllable?s participation in other prosodic processes. The domain for
tonal restrictions in Moro is the macrostem rather than the word. Onsets
from within the macrostem (progressive prefix v-) license high tone on
the initial root vowel, but those outside the macrostem do not. In
addition, macrostem affixes that bear high tone cause deletion of root
high tone and prevent the realization of tone-licensing prefixes. The
macrostem as a whole only allows a single high tone.The macrostem constituent is important not only for regulating tonal
processes, but also affix order. Object markers in Moro attach as
prefixes in imperfective aspect, but the same markers appear as suffixes
in perfective aspect, outside the macrostem. Object markers longer than a
syllable or without high tone also appear as suffixes. I argue that these
data point to a templatic approach to the mobile affixes, in the sense of
both a position and prosodic requirements within the macrostem. This is
further confirmed by double object markers. In perfective aspect, both
object markers appear as suffixes. The linear order of the two objects is
determined not based on grammatical role, but by a hierarchy of
person/number features (1 > 2 > 3 and pl > sg). In imperfective aspect,
the first object marker is realized as a prefix and the second as a
suffix; the discontinuous linear order follows the same person/number
hierarchy. The Moro data point to a templatic approach to linear ordering
(Nordlinger 2008), and also provide support for approaches to morphology
that are independent of syntactic operations.