Vowels at the morpheme boundary: The cases of Komi and Erzya

This paper presents two case studies on the morphophonology of Komi and Erzya, both belonging to the Uralic language family. Both languages are said to be agglutinative. There are some verbal forms in both languages, in which a vowel appears at the stem boundary in some paradigms, but not in other ones. The status of these vowels (whether they belong to the stem, to the suffix or to none of them) is debatable. In both languages, phonotactics plays a critical but limited role in the appearance of the vowel. The case studies describe the detailed conditions of the emergence of the vowel based on corpus data. Finally, the regularities observed in the two languages are compared.