Prosodic Morphology and Templatic Phonology

This Special Session seeks to discuss the state of our knowledge of the interrelationship between templatic morphophonology and structure (morphology, prosody, segmental structure) on the one hand, and computation (timing, ordering, underlying/output restrictions) on the other. Templatic questions were fundamental in the development of Optimality Theory, considering cases of prosodic morphology (covering phenomena like reduplication, infixation and truncation), and exploring how phonologically-based templates might determine their patterning and whether the templates involved need to be specified or might emerge from other aspects of a language's phonology (and/or be decomposed into multiple constraints on the size, shape, and position of morphemes). Templates have also played a role in a strand of work in Government Phonology, which has argued that templatic relations (in terms of a fixed number of strictly alternating CV units) are fundamental in understanding the patterning of phonological phenomena like vowel harmony, ablaut, and stress (allied to the idea that there are designated portions of a template that are the locus of morphophonological operations). Templatic phonology has been fundamental in work on understanding how segments can be ordered in a morpheme (notably in root-and-pattern morphological systems), and so questions of phonological processes which alter segmental ordering and association are relevant to understanding this aspect of phonology. Understanding prosodic morphology can have big implications - it is an area where decisions about what phonology can and cannot do reverberate throughout the whole grammar. This Special Session asks: where are we now in terms of these issues? And: how do things fit together? Or: should they not fit together and, rather, be treated separately? Do we agree on the fundamental roles/behaviours of templates in phonology? We hope that our invited speakers will address some of these issues (and other related matters) from a range of perspectives in this session.

Noam Faust (Universite Paris 8)