The morphosyntactic reality of phonological form

Overview

Apparent reference to a noun’s phonological form is common in noun class and gender systems.¹ However, if morphosyntactic operations are mediated by abstract features, as has been argued most explicitly by Anderson (1992), Zwicky (1987), and Zwicky and Pullum (1986), then phonological identities between nouns and their corresponding agreement markers cannot be expressed directly in morphosyntactic rules.

In the Arapeshan dialects spoken in Papua New Guinea, gender has an abstract morphological basis in that the genders classify singular/plural pairs, rather than individual noun forms: nouns are assigned to one of of thirteen syntactic genders depending on their patterning with respect to a fixed set of canonical singular/plural pairings (cf. Aronoff 1992, 1994). Nevertheless, a noun’s final phonological segment also plays a pivotal role in the assignment and realization of gender. The gender classes overwhelmingly divide along lines distinguishing the singular forms (cf. Dobrin 1995a), so that the number of genders is nearly equal to the number of phonotactically permissible noun-final segments. Furthermore, the noun-final segments is normally copied in cross-referential gender marking on syntactically and anaphorically associated words, creating what is typically called an “alliterative” pattern of agreement marking.

In line with this phonological pattern, several Arapeshan dialects have developed a new gender which incorporates s-final borrowings and takes alliterative agreement with s (Arapesh lacks native s-final singular nouns). This innovation is especially remarkable since there exists a native default gender to which such borrowings might be expected to assimilate. The spontaneous development of an s-gender strongly suggests that reference to noun-final phonological form is a real, if latent, force in Arapesh noun classification. Such a force can be given analytical expression by stating the morphosyntactic agreement generalization directly in terms of phonological form.