GRADE ALTERNATION IN INARI SAAMI AND ABSTRACT DECLARATIVE PHONOLOGY 1

• Main Author: Patrik Bye
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Inari; saami
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.131.7911; http://www.hum.uit.no/a/bye/papers/inari-ntv.pdf

This article provides a declarative phonological analysis of the intricate morphophonology of bisyllabic nouns in Inari Saami. In traditional process morphophonemics, the view underlying the vast bulk of generative work, morphophonemes are phonetically coherent elements drawn from the same universal alphabet as discrete phonetic segments. However, morphophonemes are converted to discrete phonetic segments by destructive processes which cannot be accommodated within a monostratal approach. I propose to solve this problem for Declarative Phonology by representing morphophonemes as language-specific and phonetically non-coherent ‘hypercategories ’ containing more than one ‘exemplar cloud’. Assuming that drawing up the articulatory plan for a segment depends on identifying a unique exemplar cloud from which to sample, a hypercategory is by itself phonetically uninterpretable. Purely information-adding operations in the phonological component serve to specify a particular exemplar cloud for the purposes of rendering the hypercategory phonetically interpretable. 1