Sketch of Melanau Morphology

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Sketch of Melanau Morphology

• A Typological Approach

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Preliminaries Morphology and the Comparative
Method

• The CM is designed to explain regular
  correspondences (correspondence sets) and at the
  same time to organize the exceptions (also called
  irregularities).
• The three main causes of irregularity are
  borrowing, analogy, and archaic residue.
• There are others, including free variation and
  partial lexical diffusion of a sound change.

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Three causes of irregularity

• Borrowing introduces words into the language that
  have not developed organically from the
  proto-language.
• Analogy can alter or erase the effects of sound
  changes, inducing phonological irregularity in
  service to morphological regularity.
• Free variation signals a potential sound change
  in progress. At first, an innovating variant may
  appear as an irregularity. In time, it may
  become the only variant, which will then be
  regular.

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Analogy

• Todays topic is analogy as the cause of certain
  irregularities in the phonological comparisons.
• The topic is so named because in large part,
  grammatical change operates on the Principle of
  Analogy. (Crowley, Chapter 7, p. 150)

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Example of how analogy works

• Analogy is a logical operation that yields
  grammatical information even when lexical
  information is lacking.
• This is a wug. Over here are two _______.
• Tommorrow I will wug you.
• Ted is _________ you at this moment.
• Yesterday Beatrice ________ you at 900 a.m.
• Has she _______ Phillip yet?

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Child Language Acquisition

• Jean Berko Gleason (1958) found that six-year old
  children tended overwhelmingly to give regular
  noun and verb patterns when presented with
  Analogy tests.
• They rarely offered irregular patterns such as
  wug/wug/wug on the pattern of cut/cut/cut.
• http//www.bu.edu/psych/faculty/gleason/

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Historically, analogy begins in the mouths of
babes and can cause the loss of irregular
allomorphs.

• I falled down and hurted myself.

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Old English had a number of declensions each with
its own regular plural suffix.

• Old English Modern English
• hand-a hand-s
• gear year-s
• eag-an eye-s
• stan-as stone-s
• Arlotto (1972132)

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Back to Melanau
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Affix types

• Proto-Malayo-Polynesian had prefixes, infixes,
  and suffixes.
• Melanau dialects appear to have prefixes and
  infixes, but no suffixes. (Perhaps Kanowit has
  vestiges of suffixes, called archaic residues.)
• It seems that suffixes were lost on the path from
  PMP to PM.

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Prefixes

• Prefixes in Melanau resemble those reflected in
  hundreds of languages of the Philippines,
  Malaysia and Indonesia.
• Melanau prefixes have the shape C- or C?- or
  C?N-, where Cbilabial or nasal, and N undergoes
  systematic alternation (m, n, n, ?) as
  determined by the initial consonant of the stem.

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Prefixal C(?)-

• p(?)- nominals are semantically unpredictable.
• p(?)- verbs are causative.
• p?N- nouns and adjectives are instrumental
  meaning for. Allomorphs include p?m-, p?n,
  p?n- and p??-.
• b(?)- verbs are intransitive meanings range from
  having to doing.
• s(?)- adjectives and nouns denote wholeness
• t(?)- verbs and adjectives denote stative

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Prefixal nasals with verbs

• m(?)- transitive verb, active voice.
  Allomorphs include an infix -u-.
• n(?)- transitive verb, passive voice.
  Allomorphs include an infix -i-.
• (m?)N- intransitive verb, activity or motion.
  Allomorphs include m?m-, m?n, m?n-, m??-, m?-
  and m-, n- n-, ?-.

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m?- m- -u-
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Back Formation /p/ gt p and /b/ gt b
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Blusts Infixing Rules for Mukah Melanau

• The active-transitive verb morpheme manifests as
  infix -u-, and the passive manifests as i-, when
  the stem-initial consonant is a voiceless
  obstruent and the adjacent penult vowel is schwa,
  e.g. t?bas tubas tibas clear-cut.
• The active infix -u- derives from PMP -um-, and
  the passive infix -i- derives from PMP -in-.

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Melanau passive infix -i-
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Nasal Substitution

• NS applies to p?N- and m?N- alike.

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Nasal Substitution

• NS rule prefixal N- assimilates to the point of
  articulation of a voiceless obstruent, and then
  the latter disappears.
• Belawi
• p?N- sapaw gt p?n-sapaw gt p?n-apaw
• Kanowit
• p?N-sabo? gt N-sabo? gt n-sabo? gt n-abo?

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Compounding and Reduplication
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A Note on Austronesian Root Theory

• Many researchers (Gonda 1969, Blust 1988, Wolff
  19xz) have attempted to recover a number of
  monosyllabic roots that appear as recurring
  partials in many words across the language
  family. Such monosyllables cannot be
  reconstructed for Proto-Malayo-Polynesian or
  Proto-Austronesian, because virtually all of the
  reconstructable vocabulary is disyllabic.
• Therefore these roots remain largely
  unaccounted for.

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Possible examples
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This is just a taste of Melanau morphology.

• Summary Morphological analogy, as a force of
  grammatical change, can alter or erase the
  effects of phonological change.
• Like borrowing, analogy is used by historical
  phonologists to explain apparent irregularities.

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What to do about a suspected analogical formation?

• If a word-part is affected by analogy, it is set
  aside for the moment. Only the remainder
  (usually the stem) is grist for the phonological
  mill.

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Nature of Internal Reconstruction

• Notice that formally speaking, internal
  reconstruction differs little from (synchronic)
  morphophonemics, whose goal is to posit an
  underlying form. In historical phonology, the
  same kind of result is interpreted as the older
  form, from which the attested data is derived via
  grammatical or phonological change.

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Ablaut problem
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This material is intended to illustrate the
principles presented in Chapter 6 (and a tiny bit
of Chapter 7) of our textbook.

• LING 485/585
• Winter 2009