Robert Kennedy, UCSB

Analogy and allomorphy in Hawaiian reduplication
(adapted from Kennedy & Parker Jones, in prep)

In this paper we apply phonological neighborhood modeling to account for morphological conditioning in the reduplicative system of Hawaiian (Pukui & Elbert 1979).  Hawaiian uses three general patterns of reduplication: a foot suffix, e.g. [kahana~hana] ‘clearing in a forest’, a foot prefix e.g. [poha~pohaka] ‘spot’, and a syllable prefix e.g. [ma~make] ‘many deaths’.  The choice among these is allomorphic, as the different reduplicative patterns do not map to distinct functions.

We propose that the choice of reduplicative pattern is partially analogical, in that roots tend to adhere to the same reduplicative patterns as phonologically similar roots.  Using Pukui and Elbert (1986) as a lexicon, we evaluate similarity via phonological neighborhood.  For each reduplicating root, we count the number of its phonological neighbors that reduplicate with each of the three patterns. For example, [kahana~hana] has the root [kahana], with 16 neighbors, of which 1 uses the syllable prefix, 1 uses the foot prefix, 6 use the foot suffix, and 8 have no reduplicated form. 

A multinomial regression analysis shows that analogy is a significant predictor of the choice of reduplicative affix.  For any given root, as the number of its neighbors that reduplicate with a particular reduplicative pattern increases, so does the probability that it reduplicates with the same pattern.

This study has implications for the role of probabilistic modeling in phonology and morphology.  It also offers an account of a plausible trajectory for the diachronic emergence of allomorphy, while allowing each allomorphic variant to remain productive.