Mirror Principle Violations are Phonologically Conditioned: Evidence from Choguita Rarámuri
Felicitas Andermann, Jona Sommer, Jochen Trommer
March 2025 

A predominant assumption in the vast literature on the Mirror Principle is that exceptions to the principle are due to morphology (Hyman 2003; Ryan 2010; Popp 2021). In this paper, we provide evidence, based on Rarámuri, that the role of phonology in accounting for Mirror Principle violations is much bigger than usually assumed. According to Caballero (2008, 2010), only a small part of the ordering patterns in the language is prosodically conditioned, Here, we argue that Caballero’s prosody-based explanation should be extended to all cases of Mirror Principle violations in the language. The central advantage of the phonological approach is that it directly links the different behaviors of specific affixes in ordering to their independent morphophonological differences. To show the viability of a fully phonological analysis, we provide a full reanalysis of Caballero’s data in Stratal Optimality Theory assuming prosodic subcategorization in terms of virtual structure (Lionnet & Rolle 2020) and Gradient Symbolic Representations (Smolensky & Goldrick 2016; Zimmermann 2018, 2021; Hsu 2022).

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008942 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	submitted to Phonological Data and Analysis
keywords:	affix order, prosody, gradient symbolic representations, stratal ot, mirror principle, morphology, phonology
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