Prosodic Morphology: Constraint Interaction and Satisfaction

Prosodic Morphology (McCarthy and Prince 1986 et seq.) is a theory of how morphological and phonological determinants of linguistic form interact with one another in a grammatical system. More specifically, it is a theory of how prosodic structure impinges on templatic and circumscription morphology, such as reduplication and infixation. There are three essential claims:(1) Principles of Prosodic Morphologya. Prosodic Morphology HypothesisTemplates are defined in terms of the authentic units of prosody: mora (μ), syllable (σ), foot (Ft), prosodic word (PrWd).b. Template Satisfaction ConditionSatisfaction of templatic constraints is obligatory and is determined by the principles of prosody, both universal and language-specific.c. Prosodic CircumscriptionThe domain to which morphological operations apply may be circumscribed by prosodic criteria as well as by the more familiar morphological ones.In short, the theory of Prosodic Morphology says that templates and circumscription must be formulated in terms of the vocabulary of prosody and must respect the well-formedness requirements of prosody.But this picture is incomplete in various crucial respects. With most work in contemporary phonological theory, it underarticulates the role of well-formedness constraints; knowing that they are obeyed is not the same as knowing how they are obeyed and why they may be violated under other conditions. A more local problem, which we will document extensivelybelow, is that the vocabulary and constraints of prosody can be active in morphology that is neither templatic nor circumscriptional, where the principles of Prosodic Morphology are without force. Thus, the standard theory is incomplete in a significant way. Finally, there are cases, also discussed below, where the standard theory is empirically wrong — cases where, for example, templatic constraints are not satisfied obligatorily or infixation cannot be analyzed by the circumscription of prosodic constituents.