The Emergence of the *ed in Word (De-)Formation
Abstract
Inflection and derivation are usually expressed by concatenative affixation, but there are nonconcatenative forms of morphological operations in the form of infixation, affixation of phonological features, templatic reshaping involving deletion, epenthesis and metathesis, reduplication and subtraction. Language games (secret languages or ludlings) make use of the same strategies of word formation to deform and conceal words. We show how some language games fill the gaps in the typology of prosodic morphology if analyzed in terms of Direct Optimality Theory, an approach to lexical storage in which morphemes are represented as the (decisive) constraint violations incurred by their exponents. Theoretically costly assumptions made in previous accounts of language games, such as Anti-Faithfulness and game-specific constraints are rendered unnecessary in the Direct OT approach.
Keywords
language games, Direct Optimality Theory, prosodic morphologyReferences
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