The event will be held via Zoom: ubc.zoom.us/j/64763345823.The passcode is 635410. (The meeting ID is 647 6334 5823.)
Samuel Akinbo (UBC) will present a colloquium entitled, “Featural Affixation as Featural Correspondence in Fungwa”.
Abstract: This paper investigates a pattern of featural affixation in Fungwa (Kainji, Nigeria). In the language, diminutive and augmentative are marked by fronting and backing non-high root vowels respectively. The root-vowel mutation is a result of diminutive and augmentative morphemes which have [−back] and [+back] features as their phonetic exponents. Formally, the realisation of the featural affixes at the edges of root morphemes is the effect of featural-correspondence constraints (McCarthy and Prince, 1995; Finley, 2009). The realisation of the featural affixes on medial vowels is motivated by locality and featural integrity (Pulleyblank, 1996; Nevins, 2010). Given that the featural affixes are not realised on high vowels, I argue that the realisation of the featural affixes involves prominence-based licensing condition (Walker, 2011). Fungwa presents a productive case of synesthetic sound symbolism in evaluative morphology (Scalise, 1984; Stump, 1993; Bauer, 1997).
