Speaker: Maria Gouskova (NYU) I test this theory on a famous purported case of segment-by-segment Suggested readings:<\/p>\n Speaker: Maria Gouskova (NYU) Title: Exceptionality as a Property of Morphemes: the Case of Yers Time: Friday, October 30, 2009, 3:30pm Place: 32-141 Most languages have some phonological rules that apply only to a subset of eligible morphemes (for example, in English, regressive voicing assimilation, “thie[f]”\/”thie[vz]” vs. the default progressive assimilation, “chie[f]”\/”chie[fs]”). The question examined […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1034"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1036,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1034\/revisions\/1036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nTitle: Exceptionality as a Property of Morphemes: the Case of Yers
\nTime: Friday, October 30, 2009, 3:30pm
\nPlace: 32-141<\/a><\/P><\/p>\n
\nMost languages have some phonological rules that apply only to a
\nsubset of eligible morphemes (for example, in English, regressive
\nvoicing assimilation, “thie[f]”\/”thie[vz]” vs. the default progressive
\nassimilation, “chie[f]”\/”chie[fs]”). The question examined in this
\ntalk is whether there are rules that apply only to a subset of
\neligible segments. I will explore the hypothesis that exceptionality
\nis a property of whole morphemes. This theory of exceptionality has
\nmany incarnations (Chomsky and Halle 1968 et seq.), but my version is
\nformalized as Lexically Indexed Constraints in Optimality Theory
\n(Prince and Smolensky 1993): in any given language, a universal
\nconstraint can be indexed to individual morphemes in the lexicon and
\nranked in two different positions in the language’s hierarchy (Pater
\n2000, 2006).<\/p>\n
\nexceptions: Slavic yers, vowels that idiosyncratically alternate with
\nzero (e.g., [mox] vs. [mx-a] `moss (nom\/gen sg)’ alongside [mex] vs.
\n[mex-a] `fur (nom\/gen sg)’). The dominant analysis of these “ghost
\nvowels” is that they must be underlyingly marked as exceptional on a
\nsegment-by-segment basis. Yers are also usually underlyingly marked as
\nrepresentationally defective—either nonmoraic or lacking features
\n(Kenstowicz and Rubach 1987, Melvold 1990, Yearley 1995, inter alia).
\nIn this talk, I revisit yers from a different perspective. Instead of
\ntreating the individual vowels as special, I argue that entire
\nmorphemes are indexed to special phonologies. I show that there are
\ngeneralizations as to the quality and the position of alternating
\nvowels in Russian. These generalizations are phonologically sensible,
\nbut they are lost in accounts where vowels are labeled as deletable on
\na segment-by-segment basis. Finally, I survey yers in other Slavic
\nlanguages and test the OT hypothesis that a phonological rule can only
\nbe exceptional in one language if it is general in another.<\/P>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n