Seenku tone sandhi is compatible with traditional cyclicity
Keywords: Seenku, grammatical tone, subtonal features, phonological cyclicity, stratal OT
TL;DR: to be considered for the main session (talk + poster)
Abstract: In Seenku (Mande, Burkina Faso), plural formation and phrasal tone sandhi interact to determine the surface shape of nouns. When the sandhi trigger appears in the plural, plural formation precedes phrasal tone sandhi, an expected ordering from the point of view of theories of phonology like Stratal OT, but when the sandhi target appears in the plural, phrasal tone sandhi must precede plural formation, which runs afoul of the architectural assumptions of theories of phonology like Stratal OT. We demonstrate that the Seenku pattern is amenable to an analysis whereby plural formation strictly precedes phrasal tone sandhi, and we also show that phrasal tone sandhi can be modelled as post-lexical tone spreading, contra McPherson's (2019) claim that it represents an instance of generalized root allomorphy.
Submission Number: 123
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