Morphological boundary glottals in A'ingae: A new argument for [δ]
Maksymilian Dąbkowski
May 2025
 

I describe and analyze patterns of syntactically conditioned allomorphy observed in A'ingae (or Cofán, an endangered Amazonian isolate, ISO 639-3: con). Three information structural morphemes—the new topic -(ʔ)ta NEW, contrastive topic -(ʔ)ja CNTR, and exclusive focus -(ʔ)yi EXCL—are realized as non-preglottalized (-ta, -ja, -yi) when attaching to most categories, such DPs, CPs, or adverbs, but as preglottalized (-ʔta, -ʔja, -ʔyi) when attaching to TPs. I propose that the glottal stop (-ʔ) is a spell-out of T° conditioned by linear adjacency to a higher-order discourse feature [δ] (Bossi and Diercks, 2019; Mikkelsen, 2015) that dominates all the maximal information structural features. By documenting an overt realization of a vocabulary item conditioned by [δ], I provide novel morphological evidence for a hierarchical arrangement of discourse features (Bossi and Diercks, 2019; Mikkelsen, 2015), and of Ā-feature geometry more broadly (e.g. Aravind, 2018; Baclawski, 2019; Baier, 2018).
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/009006
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: NELS 55: Proceedings of the Fifty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the North Eastern Linguistic Society
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