Morphophonology

I am interested in how phonology and morphology interact.

Morpho-phonological Polarity

Can a morpheme force a feature to switch values? I don’t think so:

de Lacy, Paul (2012). Morpho-phonological polarity. In Jochen Trommer (ed.)The morphology and phonology of exponence. Oxford University Press.
[pdf (version: 28 Jan 2010)] [data (Excel)] [polarity webpage] [Corrections]

Maximal Words

There can be restrictions on how big phonological words can be, and these limits can affect morphological words. I talked about this here:

de Lacy, Paul (2004). Maximal Words and the Māori passive. In John McCarthy (ed.) Optimality Theory in phonology: A reader. Blackwell, pp. 495-512.

And then my PhD student Kate Ketner (now Gürtler) wrote her dissertation about them:

Ketner, Katherine (2006). Size restrictions in prosodic morphology. Doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge. ROA 1028.

Morphological Hapology and Circumscription

I have some ideas about why some near-identical morphemes merge (e.g. cat+s(plural)+s(possessive) -> cats’):

de Lacy, Paul (1999).  Haplology and correspondence, in Paul de Lacy and Anita Nowak (eds.)Papers from the 25th Anniversary. University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers (UMOP) 24. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications, pp.51-88.  ROA 298.
[abstract] [chapter]

Or the longer version here:

de Lacy, Paul (2003). Maximal words and the Māori passive.  In Andrea Rakowski and Norvin Richards (ed.) Proceedings of AFLA VIII: The eighth meeting of the Austronesian formal linguistics association. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 44. Cambridge, MA: MIT Linguistics Dept, pp.20-39.  ROA 520.
[abstract] [chapter] [handout] [talk]

And I think that these morphemes can account for ‘circumscriptive’ morphemes, which carve out a morpheme and influence it:

de Lacy, Paul (1999). Circumscriptive morphemes. In Catherine Kitto and Carolyn Smallwood (eds.) Proceedings of AFLA (Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association) VI. Toronto: Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, pp.107-120. 
ROA 339; http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~twpl/volume16.htm
[abstract] [chapter] [poster]

(I had the beginnings of this idea in my earliest research:

de Lacy, Paul (1996). Circumscription revisited: an analysis of Maori reduplication, ROA 133.
[abstract] [article])

Concatenation

I also had some ideas about why prefixes are prefixes and suffixes are suffixes:

de Lacy, Paul (1999). A correspondence theory of morpheme order. In Peter Norquest, Jason D. Haugen, and Sonya Bird (eds.) WCCFL (West Coast Conference in Formal Linguistics) XVIII. Arizona: Coyote Working Papers in Linguistics, pp.27-45. ROA 338.

[abstract] [chapter] [poster]