Morphologically conditioned phonology with two triggers

Abstract

Morphologically conditioned phonology, where a particular phonological alternation or requirement holds only for a subset of lexical items or in a subset of morphological contexts, is well documented. This paper expands on the literature by examining phonological alternations where two independent triggering morphemes must both be present for a phonological alternation to apply. Several cases of doubly morphologically conditioned phonological alternations, from a diverse set of languages, are described. The existence of morphologically conditioned phonology with two triggers informs our models of the interface between morphology and phonology, in that phonological operations must be able to reference the presence of more than one morpheme simultaneously. A range of possible analyses are considered, including those set in Stratal OT, Indexed Constraint Theory, Cophonology Theory and Cophonologies by Phase Theory. A Cophonologies by Phase account is found to be optimal, where multiple morpheme-specific phonological requirements accumulate and co-trigger alternations within a single spell-out domain.