Paul de Lacy's academic website

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.

and here, too:

de Lacy, Paul (2020). Do morphophonological exchange rules exist? A reply to DiCanio et al. (2020). Phonological Data & Analysis 2.4: 29-43. doi: 10.3765/pda.v2no4.46

Maximal Words

I proposed that prosodic words can be restricted in size, and those limits can affect morphological words. I talk 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 the longer 2003 version.

My student Kate Ketner (now Gürtler) wrote her dissertation about maximal words:

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.

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.

and another paper in 2017, and an earlier paper in 1996.

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.