Dolatian (2020): Computational locality of cyclic phonology in Armenian #

This file formalizes the analysis of destressed high vowel reduction in Chapters 1 and 2 of [Dol20] and its computational rendering in Chapter 6. Armenian stress falls on the rightmost full vowel of a word, (1), and is reassigned as each suffix is added; a high vowel that was stressed in the base and loses stress in the derivative, and only such a vowel, reduces, deleting when the cluster it leaves is syllabifiable and otherwise becoming schwa, (46). Reduction is cyclic without bound, (5) and (48): each morpheme may trigger a new round of stress shift and reduction. It is stratal, after [Kip82]: in Western Armenian the derivational suffixes that build morphological stems trigger the stem-level cophonology of stress shift with reduction, while the inflectional suffixes that build morphological words trigger the word-level cophonology of stress shift alone, (7) to (9). And it is prosodic: in Eastern Armenian vowel-initial inflection reduces as well, (10) and (65), because onset maximization resyllabifies the stem-final consonant and misaligns the Prosodic Stem of [Dow99] that the morphological stem maps to; the misaligned stem expands over the suffix and triggers a cophonology of its own, which reduces high vowels in Eastern but not in Western Armenian and reduces the diphthong uj in neither, (76) and (78). The plural allomorphy of (66), -er after monosyllables and -ner after polysyllables, thereby decides whether a plural reduces its base. Reduction itself is a quantifier-free logical transduction in the sense of [Cha14a], §6.6.1: given the destressing diacritic, deletion and schwa are read off two segments on either side of the target.

Implementation notes #

Segments are kept at the granularity the analysis reads: consonant, high vowel, other full vowel, the diphthong uj, and schwa, so that u and i are one symbol and the segmental detail of [Vau98] is not represented. Stress is computed as the position of the rightmost full vowel rather than as the logical transduction of Chapter 5, and destressing compares that position across a cycle; the reduction step is the transduction dhr, run on the string with the destressed vowel marked, so a cycle composes a stress function with a quantifier-free map, and the domain label that the dissertation's SETTINGS constant supplies to the reduction formulas is the cophonology argument of reduce. Syllabifiability, (46), is the condition that the destressed vowel be flanked by single consonants that themselves neighbour nuclei. Prosodic Stem misalignment is read off the stem-final consonant and the suffix-initial vowel, without a syllabification. The foot and recursive prosodic word alternatives of §2.5.3, the lexical exceptions of (72) and the variation of §2.7.3, and the compound bracketing paradox of Chapter 3 are not formalized.

TODO #

The complex-coda clause of (46), a second consonant before the target licensed when the two form a falling-sonority coda, needs a sonority scale over consonants; with one consonant symbol, dhr gives schwa where the dissertation deletes, as in jergír ~ jergr-a-kúnt, (17).

Dolatian (2020): Computational locality of cyclic phonology in Armenian #

Implementation notes #

TODO #

References #

Segments and stress, (1) #

Reduction as a quantifier-free transduction, (46) and §6.6.1 #

Cophonologies, (76) #

Strata, the Prosodic Stem and the cycle, (9), (14) and (78) #

What the cophonologies exclude #

The forms, (5), (10), (12), (42), (47), (48), (65) and (66) #