Root alternations provide evidence for two distinct prosodic constituents within Blackfoot verbs: the Prosodic Word (PWd) and the Prosodic Stem (PStem). Each constituent is associated with distinct resolutions of onsetless syllables and left edge restrictions, requiring different phonological grammars. This talk focuses on the cyclic application of phonology within a prosodic structure, and what this tells us about the correspondence between syntactic and prosodic structure.
Natalie Weber gave a colloquium at UMass Amherst
Natalie Weber gave a talk at UMass Amherst titled “Cyclic interpretation of prosodic structure inside of polysynthetic words”.
Over the last decade there has been a renewed interest in domain-delimited phonological processes and their correspondence with syntax (cf. overviews in Bennett & Elfner 2019; Elfner 2018; Elordieta 2008, Scheer 2011), though theories of prosody-syntax correspondence remain poorly tested on polysynthetic languages (Elfner 2018). This talk focuses on phonological processes within the verb in Blackfoot (Algonquian), a polysynthetic language. I argue that Blackfoot requires two types of mismatches from prosody: constituency mismatches and edge mismatches, which exist in a feeding relationship, as pictured (see similar ideas in Itô & Mester 2019; Kratzer & Selkirk 2020; Lee & Selkirk 2023).
