Ussishkin 2000

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The Emergence of Fixed Prosody

Adam Panter Ussishkin
UCSC PhD dissertation, 2000

This is a dissertation about prosodic structural restrictions in language. It investigates in detail the prosodic structure of Modern Hebrew, using the framework of Optimality Theory to analyze nonconcatenative word formation in prosodic morphology. Semitic languages have for some time been assumed to involve so-called "root-and-pattern morphology", whereby words are productively formed by interdigitating vocalic affixes among consonantal roots.

In this dissertation, I provide a detailed examination of the structure of the Modern Hebrew verbal paradigm in order to explain both the minimality and maximality effects evident in prosodic size. Other empirical domains studied include the verbal paradigm of Arabic and the active and passive verbal paradigms of the Austronesian language Mukah Melanau.

A major finding examined in this dissertation is that the consonantal root is reduced to an epiphenomenon of more basic principles having to do with the prosodic restrictions imposed on words in these languages. From a theoretical standpoint, this move results in another major consequence: the elimination of so-called templatic constraints from OT, thus simplifying the theory. Rather than resulting from templatic requirements, I argue that templatic effects in Modern Hebrew are a case of fixed prosody, a term which refers to the bisyllabic nature of surface forms in the verbal paradigm of the language.

email the author at ussishki at email.arizona.edu

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