An Outline of the Phonology and Morphophonology of Ikpeng (Cariban)

This paper describes the phonology and morphophonology of Ikpeng, a Cariban language of central Brazil, based on first-hand fieldwork data. A presentation of the patterns of allophony for each class of contrastive segments is followed by a discussion of Ikpeng phonotactics and of its complex morphophonology. For the former we place special emphasis on attested consonant clusters and on identifying syllable boundaries in stop-liquid clusters. The discussion of morphophonology centers on alternations involving stop consonants at morpheme boundaries, on vowel ablaut, and on the Ikpeng instantiation of the pan-Cariban phenomenon of syllable reduction. The conclusion is that these alternations show a significant degree of morphologization.