Showing posts with label morphophonology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label morphophonology. Show all posts

Sunday, July 10, 2016

Detail #299: An Idea for a Morphophonology

So, I have been planning this morphophonological system for Sargaĺk, originally, but have abandoned it because it just didn't really fit with the imaginary history of the language.

The idea is that morphemes do not consist of strings of phonemes (although phonemes are also permitted to occur), but by strings of underspecified phonemes. Thus, you can have a thing like
passive: {+back}l{-occlusive +voiced}
Depending on the phonological context in which this appears, phonemes will be picked to realize these features using some set of rules. The fun appears when multiple morphemes appear together. Also, "weak brackets" would be ones that permit for merging with the previous/next phoneme. A hierarchy of features would determine how the resulting set of features ends up. Let us use {/ and /} for such brackets.

Each underspecified phoneme could of course maybe have a 'strongest' feature that could be written in bolds or as the leftmost feature or whatever, to which special rules apply. Coming back to the passive marker presented previously, we could suffix the following morpheme:
first person: {/ +semivowel}a
Thus we get 
{+back}l{-occlusive +voiced}{/ +semivowel}a → {+back}lwa
What maybe happens there is that the backness present before l velarizes l, which leads to +semivowel coming out as /w/ rather than /j/. 

Of course, at times a combination of features just might not be realizeable, say e.g. {+occlusive/} {/ -occlusive} or {+velar /} {/ -velar }. For such conflicts, a set of rules need to exist. At other times, the interpretation need not be entirely literal.

Monday, August 5, 2013

Detail #53: Grammatical and pragmatical length

I suspect this violates some universals pretty strongly, which pleases me quite a bit.

Imagine a system where length is phonemic, but does not distinguish lexemes. Instead, length comes in patterns such as
sLss, LsLs, LLss, LLLs, ssss, LLsL
where L = long, s = short. These are applied to individual phonemes. Different patterns signify different grammatical and pragmatical information. Example patterns - just for illustrative purposes - given with Kleene-algebra notation. Some of them may span several words, some of them are applied sentence-initially, some are applied from the start of a noun.

verbal and sentence-initial patterns:
LLssL(s*) = yes/no-question
(sL)* = indicative, unmarked
s* = indicative, unmarked
s(LL)s* = imperative
s*LL = if interrogative particle is included, marks that the listener is repeating what he thought he heard in order to get confirmation he heard right

noun-markers:
s* = indefinite nom or acc
sLsLs* = definite nom < barely distinguished
ssLLs* = definite acc < barely distinguished
Ls* = fronted direct object

adjective markers:
LLLs* = intensive
s* = default
s*LL = verb-like, but restricted in not being able to take verbal patterns

Certain weird things can happen for phonemes that do not permit lengthening, such as the lengthening shifting one step to the right, or things along those lines. Finally, some particular patterns may trigger the appearance of extra phonemes just to carry length, usually /e/ or /n/, except after /k/, which triggers /u/ instead.