Morphophonological processes of the C’lela noun

Abstract

This article discusses some aspects of the morphophonology of C’lela nouns. It will be shown that the addition of inflectional affixes to certain noun stems in C’lela, sometime motivate certain phonological processes. The analysis demonstrates that when the plural suffix [-nV] attaches to animate nouns in C’lela, it triggers certain morphophonological processes such as vowel copying, metathesis, vowel lengthening, final-vowel deletion, and initial-consonant deletion. For example, the paper argues that in plural formation, stem final-vowel sometimes undergoes metathesis when the plural marker /-nV/ attaches to a noun stem, thus; rm ‘man’ + na becomes r -n ‘men, as against the rule of vowel epenthesis assumed in (Dettweiler 2012). In addition, the analysis discovers that the processes of metathesis and vowel lengthening are simply conditioned by phonological structure.

Key Words: morphophonology, vowel copying, metathesis, vowel lengthening