Itelmen reduplication: Edge-in association and lexical stratification

• Main Author: Jonathan David Bobaljik
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2006
• Subjects: McCarthy; Itelmen; Koryak
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.694.3318; http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/papers/ItelRed.pdf

Reduplication patterns in Itelmen (Chukotko-Kamchatkan) present a prima facie challenge to the view that association in partial reduplication is always Edge-In (Yip 1988, McCarthy & Prince 1996). Closer investigation suggests that Itelmen redupli-cation may in fact be total copying, masked by an apocope rule. This solution is not obvious, however, as the apocope rule must be limited to ‘core ’ or ‘native ’ vocabulary. While Russian loans are reasonably transparent, the analysis requires making a dis-tinction between cognates and loans from related Koryak, a distinction speakers are not consciously aware of. Positing that this distinction is part of the synchronic phonology provides a solution to other apparently unrelated phonological puzzles in the language. In addition to removing an apparent counter-example to universal Edge-In association, the proposals made here may also provide a small argument for the lexical stratification model of loanword phonology over a purely representational alternative.