Regular Morphology Vs. Prosodic Morphology? The Case of Truncations in German

Abstract

This paper is a study of the morphology and phonology of truncations in German (also known as i-Bildungen) within the framework of Optimality Theory. Truncations are shown to constitute a widespread and productive morphological pattern in Modern Standard German. The morphosyntactic properties of these forms are shown to follow from the assumption of a regular binary word-syntactic structure in which the base functions as the head, and a phonologically empty morpheme adds other, non-head, properties. The specific phonological properties can then be derived from the operation of a set of ranked constraints in the sense of Optimality Theory. The analysis implies a strong correspondence between reduplication and truncation as two related aspects of prosodic morphology. © 2001, Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.