9420424 Prosodic Morphology (PM) is the study of how prosody plays a role in word formation. Prosody deals with the structure of syllables and the larger units into which they are grouped, stress-feet and phonological words. Prosody impinges on word formation in various ways, but particularly conspicuously in phenomena like reduplication. Optimality Theory (OT) is a model of how constraints on linguistic form interact with one another. A fundamental notion in OT is the idea that constraints are ranked with respect to one another, and that constraints are violated when violation leads to satisfaction of a higher-ranking constraint. Because it is a very general approach to constraint interaction, and because it can deal with the interaction of very diverse constraints (such as constraints on prosody and constraints on morphology), OT is a particularly apt framework to apply to PM. The goal of this project is to study the areas where the theory of PM intersects with OT. Preliminary results strongly indicate that each of these theories will lead to a better understanding of the other, and that the two together will shed new light on linguistic phenomena. Based on previous work, a number of likely hypotheses and potentially productive research questions have been identified. These hypotheses and questions will be studied through extensive empirical investigation of phenomena like reduplication, infixation, root-and-pattern morphology, and morphological truncation. Both cross-language surveys and intensive study of the systems of particular languages will be undertaken. The results will be reported in several articles and, at the conclusion of the project, in a monograph summarizing all of the material.
