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Morphological Complexity within and across Boundaries: In honour of Aslı Göksel
Edited by Aslı Gürer, Dilek Uygun-Gökmen and Balkız Öztürk
[Studies in Language Companion Series 215] 2020
► pp. 263–284

Same exponent, different strength

A Gradient Harmonic account of allomorphy in Greek

| Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
In this article we discuss two vowel-deletion processes in Greek that show variation, even within the same prosodic domain, namely deletion of the compound theme vowel /-o-/ and deletion of /e/ in the pl imperative inflection /-ete/. We attribute variation to the underlying activity of the segments that are part of their phonological representation (Inkelas 2015; Smolensky & Goldrick 2016). More specifically, we argue that there exist allomorphs that differ only in the contrastive activation of their underlying segments. From the perspective of Gradient Harmonic Grammar (Smolensky & Goldrick 2016), gradient activity and constraint weight contribute jointly to the harmony of candidate outputs, determining the winner. As a result, exponents in which the relevant vowels (i.e. /-o-/ and /e/) have different input activities yield variation when computed by the same grammar.
Keywords: Gradient Harmonic Grammar, Gradient Symbolic Representations, activity, phonological variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Variation in the realization of vocalic elements
    • 2.1Deletion of /-o-/ in compounds
    • 2.2Deletion of /e/ in imperatives
  • 3.Exponents with gradiently active symbols
  • 4.A GHG analysis of gradiently active vowels
    • 4.1Deletion of the compound theme vowel /-o-/
    • 4.2Deletion of /e/ in 2pl imperative verb forms, and optionality
  • 5.Exploring an alternative analysis
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.215.10rev
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