skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Search for: All records

Creators/Authors contains: "Baerman, Matthew"

Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

  1. Abstract Verbs in Dinka (West Nilotic, Nilo-Saharan) are largely monosyllabic, but nonetheless the language displays a rich inventory of inflectional and derivational forms realized through alternations of the stem vowel with a morphomic distribution. The inflectional paradigm is driven by two complementary alternations which Andersen (1993, 2017) characterizes in phonological terms:fronting, which changes a stem vowel /a/ to /ɛ/, andlowering, which lowers or diphthongizes all other stem vowels. Both look like they might have been produced by the assimilatory effects of suffixes which have now been lost. While this is undoubtedly the case withlowering(Andersen, 1990), we argue thatfrontingwas due to morphological analogy,pacevan Urk and Chong (2022). Strikingly, the result was a vowel alternation pattern otherwise unattested in the verbal system, and whose resemblance to a phonologically conditioned change is purely coincidental. Our proposed reconstruction reveals two noteworthy and typologically unusual properties of this analogical change: (i) it operated on the overall system of morphophonological alternations, not on individual paradigms, and (ii) its output was determined by the phonological ambiguity of the analogical model, which we take to be a novel route towards the emergence of morphomes. 
    more » « less
    Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 10, 2026