Phonological Conditions on Affixation

Other types of assimilation including consonant harmony across a vowel are also
common but are not represented in this survey among examples of PCSA. There are two
examples of what may have originated in lenition that could be related to C-to-V feature
assimilation. One of these is found in Yidiɲ (Pama-Nyungan, Australia; Dixon 1977). In
Yidiɲ, the locative/instrumental/allative allomorphs are distributed based on whether the
stem is consonant-final or vowel final (Dixon 1980: 296). Their distribution is as follows:
-la occurs after vowel-final stems, 3 as in (5)a, while -da (with assimilation of the initial
stop to the place of a preceding nasal and predictable lengthening of the last vowel of the
stem) occurs after consonant-final stems, as in ((5)b). Examples are shown below
(examples are from Dixon 1977: 128-129 except where different page numbers are noted
next to an example).
(5) a. gabuḑu-la ‘white clay-LOC’ ḑimuru-la ‘house-LOC’ (518)
b. muḑa:m-ba ‘mother-LOC’ warḑa:n-da ‘boat-LOC’
muyga:l-da ‘hole, trap-LOC’ maŋgumbar-da ‘grub sp.-LOC’
These allomorphs are not related through a general rule of the language, so the
allomorphy is likely suppletive. One possible way of looking at the pattern is as lenition
of the suffix-initial consonant between vowels. Perhaps in the surface form, the stem-
modifying the GDFAC, the strong version of which does hold for all other examples in
the survey.
3
According to Dixon (1977: 128), a more precise statement of the distribution is that
vowel-final stems with an odd number of syllables take -la, while vowel-final stems with
an even syllable count have their final vowel lengthened instead. However, Dixon points
out (1977: 128) that these two allomorphs could relate to a single underlying form /-la/
since, based on the usual phonotactics of the language, -la would reduce to -:l for this
stem type, and one could therefore write a rule deleting [l] in this affix (though, as Dixon
mentions, this would be an ad hoc rule). The possibility of a rule-based analysis of the
post-vocalic allomorphs must be the reason why Dixon (1980: 296) characterizes these
allomorphs as having a single underlying form.
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