This groundbreaking new study takes a novel approach to reduplication, a phenomenon whereby languages use repetition to create new words. Sharon Inkelas and Cheryl Zoll argue that the driving force in reduplication is identity at the morphosyntactic, not the phonological level, and present a new model of reduplication - Morphological Doubling Theory - that derives the full range of reduplication patterns. This approach shifts the focus away from the relatively small number of cases of phonological overapplication and underapplication, which have played a major role in earlier studies, to the larger class of cases where base and reduplicant diverge phonologically. The authors conclude by arguing for a theoretical shift in phonology, which entails more attention to word structure. As well as presenting the authors' pioneering work, this book also provides a much-needed overview of reduplication, the study of which has become one of the most contentious in modern phonological theory.

This groundbreaking new study takes a novel approach to reduplication, a phenomenon whereby languages use repetition to create new words. Sharon Inkelas and Cheryl Zoll argue that the driving force in reduplication is identity at the morphosyntactic, not the phonological level, and present a new model of reduplication - Morphological Doubling Theory - that derives the full range of reduplication patterns. This approach shifts the focus away from the relatively small number of cases of phonological overapplication and underapplication, which have played a major role in earlier studies, to the larger class of cases where base and reduplicant diverge phonologically. The authors conclude by arguing for a theoretical shift in phonology, which entails more attention to word structure. As well as presenting the authors' pioneering work, this book also provides a much-needed overview of reduplication, the study of which has become one of the most contentious in modern phonological theory.

This book proposes a new way of understanding the behavior of consonants and vowels in a broad cross-section of the world's languages. A new model of subsegmental phonology within optimality theory that differs from standard autosegmental phonology both in its limited use of representational distinctions and in the form of the grammar to which the representations submit is introduced. The research focuses particularly on floating features and ghost segments, and demonstrates that the current understanding of segmental representation fails to characterize the full range of subsegmental phenomena found cross-linguistically. Zoll proposes instead an analysis in which the grammar derives the variety of surface phenomena from a single underlying representation. This work both enlarges the empirical foundation on which an adequate theory of segment structure must be based, and in developing such an account sheds new light on classic problems of subsegmental parsing.