USC Advanced Undergraduate Phonology ✳︎ Fall 2019 ✳︎ Smith

Goals

• to develop, present, and argue for an SPE-style system of rules for a complicated data set

Instructions

• Account for all phonological alternations in these data.

• Start with the data in part (A), and then, for each successive part (B–D), modify your analysis as needed by adding new rules or modifying existing ones.

• Remember that the final set of rules you end up with must account for all of the data.

• Your analysis should conform to the assumptions we’ve been making:

  • Every morpheme has a unique UR.
  • URs are composed of feature bundles.
  • Phonological rules manipulate features.
  • Rules apply in sequence.
  • Assume the Hayes (2009) feature set in the Dropbox folder.

• Otherwise, you are free to be as creative as you’d like:

  • Abbreviatory conventions are allowed, if they provide a better analysis.
  • You can use abstract URs, if they provide a better analysis.
  • If you use either, make sure you justify their inclusion.

• Other things to note about the data:

  • You may assume a phonetically arbitrary /lt/ ➔ [ʃ] rule.
  • Vː indicates a long vowel, which has the feature [+long] in this feature system.

• Specifications for solution. Your solution must contain:

  • Description of alternations: Clearly describe each alternation that you observe, in relatively theory-neutral terms.
  • URs: Clearly state the URs of each morpheme (each root and each suffix).
  • Rules: For each alternation, clearly state (and name) a phonological rule or rules which operate on the URs you posited. Make your rules don’t have any unnecessary features.
  • Discussion of alternatives: If you handled a given alternation (e.g. X ~ Y) by assuming underlying X and rule X → Y, discuss why that choice is better than the alternative (e.g. assuming underlying Y and rule Y → X).
  • Rule ordering and derivation: In this problem, the order of rules probably matters. Provide an ordering argument, using proof-by-demonstration: for relevant sample inputs, ordering rule A before rule B achieves the correct result, while ordering B before A does not. Make it very clear which pairwise orderings are necessary and which pairwise orderings don’t matter.

• I’ve posted a handout including write-up tips, which is relevant for every assignment, and you should read it.

How to write it up

• Write up your solution in the form of a short paper, with an introduction, titled sections, and a conclusion.
• You are encouraged to collaborate on solving the problem, but you must write up your own analysis.
• Organize your analysis into sections in whatever way makes the problem and solution clearest. The clearest write-up probably does not have a section for each section of data below. These divisions are to help you find the rules.

Data part A

Data part B

Data part C

Data part D