Abstract: The present study attempts to provide an insightful analysis of the second radical reduplication in Amharic, one of the Semitic languages spoken in the central and southern highlands of Ethiopia. Following Unseth (2002), it is suggested that even though underlying ghost consonants (laryngeals [h, Ɂ, ḥ, ʕ] or glides [w, y]) do not typically appear in regular verbal conjugations, they may emerge in verbal reduplication. To account for this, the present study proposes a root-and-pattern analysis incorporated with sympathetic candidates (McCarthy 1999, 2003) contrary to Bat-El (1994, 2003), Ussishkin (2003, 2006) and Schluter’s (2008) word-based analyses. Given this, a candidate that satisfies the faithfulness constraint MAXTEMPLATE ⟡ is selected as a sympathetic candidate. Moreover, the faithfulness relations between the sympathetic candidates and the other candidates are evaluated through the sympathetic constraints ❀MAX-ROOT and ❀IDENTITY-[PLACE] ROOT , resulting in obligatory realizations of ghost segments in reduplication. If this notion is adopted, the data on Amharic verbal reduplication can be properly analyzed as a single phenomenon, i.e., reduplication of the underlying penultimate radical.
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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