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date: 07 December 2019

Abstract and Keywords

A central concern of Optimality Theory (OT) from its beginnings (McCarthy & Prince 1993a, Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004) has been to provide a coherent framework for formalizing solutions to the traditional problems posed by prosodic morphological constructions for the concatenative principles assumed by most morphological theories. This chapter surveys analyses of constructions such as reduplication, root-and-pattern morphology, truncation, and infixation in both ‘classic’ OT and alternative OT approaches. The aim of the chapter is to show how OT has brought a fresh perspective to the analysis of prosodic morphology constructions by providing a formalism that allows prosodic constraints to interact with morphological concatenative principles in a well-defined way. The chapter concludes with discussion of open issues in the OT approach to prosodic morphology.

Keywords: reduplication, root-and-pattern morphology, truncation, infixation, minimality, binarity, morphological doubling theory, Base Reduplicant Correspondence Theory, prosodic subcategorization, concatenative ideal

Laura J. Downing

Laura J. Downing is Professor of African Languages at the Institute for Languages and Literatures, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research is concerned with the phonology of Bantu languages, and in particular with the role of prosody in conditioning or revealing morphosyntactic structure in domains such as prosodic morphology and the phonology-syntax-information structure interface.

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