Dissertation - Michael Becker

As discussed in §3.2 above, it is not clear which vowels may intervene when –ot isselected non-locally. The current study is not particularly committed to this question, andthe analysis will go through with just minor modifications if the set of intervening vowelsturns out to include just [a] or a larger set.Among nouns that have [o] in their roots, only those that surface stressless in the plural,i.e. native nouns, could benefit from taking –ot in the plural. Loanwords, i.e. nouns thatkeep their stress on the root, would not benefit from taking –ot, since there is no [o] thatneeds licensing, and indeed loanwords do not allow exceptional ot-taking.In terms of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004), taking –im or –ot can be fruitfully understood as responding to the satisfaction of different markednessconstraints.The requirement for the masculine –im on masculine nouns is enforced by a morphologicalconstraint, φ-MATCH, which demands gender features to match in poly-morphemicwords. For an im-taker like alón (85), φ-MATCH outranks the constraint LOCAL(o), whichrequires local licensing of [o]:(85)alon MASC + {im MASC , ot FEM } φ-MATCH LOCAL(o)a. ☞ alon-ím *b. alon-ót *!Conversely, an ot-taker like xalón requires a high-ranking LOCAL(o):93