Phasal strength in A'ingae classifying subordination

I present and analyze aspects of the phonology of subordinate verbs in A'ingae (or Cofán, ISO 639-3: con), an understudied and endangered Amazonian isolate. In A'ingae, inflected verbs subordinated with nominal classifiers show patterns of stress and glottalization sensitive to the prior inflection present on the verb. This violates bracket erasure, an otherwise robust empirical generalization that states that phonological grammar cannot access morphological information from previous cycles (Kiparsky, 1982). To account for the subordinator's sensitivity to the morphological structure of the inflected verb, I introduce a family of phase-indexed faithfulness constraints. Like McPherson & Heath's (2016) phase faithfulness, these constraints allow for modeling cases where previous phonological evaluation results in greater faithfulness. The addition of indexation keeps track of the previous phase's category, allowing for faithfulness specific to particular phases.

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Publication Details

Journal
University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst
Published
2025-03-24
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/amphonology.3012
Primary Topic
Phonetics and Phonology Research
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

Phasal strength in A'ingae classifying subordination

University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst
Phonetics and Phonology Research
article

Phasal strength in A'ingae classifying subordination

article en

Abstract

I present and analyze aspects of the phonology of subordinate verbs in A'ingae (or Cofán, ISO 639-3: con), an understudied and endangered Amazonian isolate. In A'ingae, inflected verbs subordinated with nominal classifiers show patterns of stress and glottalization sensitive to the prior inflection present on the verb. This violates bracket erasure, an otherwise robust empirical generalization that states that phonological grammar cannot access morphological information from previous cycles (Kiparsky, 1982). To account for the subordinator's sensitivity to the morphological structure of the inflected verb, I introduce a family of phase-indexed faithfulness constraints. Like McPherson & Heath's (2016) phase faithfulness, these constraints allow for modeling cases where previous phonological evaluation results in greater faithfulness. The addition of indexation keeps track of the previous phase's category, allowing for faithfulness specific to particular phases.

University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst
University of California, Berkeley (US)
Quality Education
Openalex Percentile: Top 53%
Phonetics and Phonology Research
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