A Note on Sakhalin Ainu Morphophonemics

• Main Author: William J. Poser
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Sakhalin
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.20.4318; http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~wjposer/.downloads/ainumorph.ps

Introduction In her grammar of the Sakhalin (Raychiska) dialect of Ainu, Murasaki (1979) presents four rules governing the realization of stem- nal /h/ which share the peculiar property of converting /h/ into a consonant whose identity is not predictable but must be indicated in the lexicon as an idiosyncratic property of each stem. I propose here an alternative analysis in which these rules are replaced with a single phonological rule that requires no diacritic information in the lexicon. This reanalysis has the further consequence that the observed constraints on the appearance of consonants in syllable- nal position turn out to be attributable to the application of a phonological rule and not to constraints on syllabi cation per se. 2. The Problem The four rules in question fall into two classes, which Murasaki terms morphophonemic and morphophonotactic. One rule is classi ed as morphophonotactic. This is Murasaki's morphophonotactic rule #17 (p. 9), which converts the seque