Lexical Selection in Harmonic Serialism: Evidence from Jerriais Allomorphy

The University of Utah announces:

The Department of Linguistics presents a

PhD Dissertation Proposal by
Miranda McCarvel

Tuesday, November 18th 2014
3:30 pm in LNCO 2110

Lexical Selection in Harmonic Serialism: Evidence from Jerriais Allomorphy

ABSTRACT

This dissertation proposes the inclusion of Lexical Selection (LS) (Mascaró 2007) in Harmonic Serialism (HS) (McCarthy 2000) in order to account for phonologically conditioned allomorphy. Using data from Jersey Norman French (Jèrriais) I show that in order to account for the allomorphic variation seen in Jèrriais, HS needs to be modified to include the assumption that allomorphs are lexically listed, the underlying premise of LS. The current theory of morphology in a serial constraint-based framework, Optimal Interleaving (OI) (Wolf 2008), uses a single underlying representation in the input and only addresses allomorphy at the word level. The phrase level allomorphy seen in Jèrriais is incompatible with an OI based analysis. In this dissertation, I show that allomorphic variation of various parts of speech in Jèrriais can be accounted for through Harmonic Serialism-Lexical Selection (HS-LS), develop a full formal theory of HS-LS, examine certain theoretical issues that arise with the inclusion of LS in HS, and also demonstrate that the data previously accounted for through OI can also be accounted for with HS-LS.