Title of the article

1.Introduction

1.1.Background

Morphologically complex words often exhibit phonological similarities with their morphologically related base forms which they are derived from. In a number of cases, these similarities yield a marked phonological pattern given the general rules or phonotactics of the language (Kenstowicz, 1996; Burzio, 1997, 2002 etc.). In Optimality-Theory (OT), similarity between existing words is captured by Output-to-Output (OO) correspondence constraints (Burzio, 1996, 2002; Kenstowicz, 1996, 1997; Benua, 1997ab; Ito and Mester, 1997; Steriade, 2000 etc.). The marked phonological pattern arises when similarity between words takes priority over the canonical phonology of the language. OT expresses this situation by ranking OO-correspondence constraints above phonological markedness constraints. OO-correspondence constraints evaluate the output candidates and select the one which is most similar to the base.

Since the base plays a crucial role in computing the phonology of its derivatives, it is important to identify the correct surface form as the base. Many authors have observed that OO-constraints have access to the base only if the latter occurs as an independent word (Kenstowicz, 1996; Benua, 1997a; Ito and Mester, 1997)._³² Consider the s-voicing observed in the northern dialects of Italian. In these dialects, s and z are in complementary distribution. Z appears intervocalically, when the flanking vowels belong to the same phonological word (examples from Kenstowicz, 1996: 373-374).

1.1

1. 
   a[z]ola ‘button hole’
   

a[z]ilo ‘nursery school’

ca[z]-a ‘house’

ca[z]-ina ‘house - diminutive’

b. lo [s]apevo ‘I knew it’

telefonati [s]i ‘having called each other’
The distribution of s-voicing in lexical items containing a prefix is more complicated. When the target precedes the boundary, s-voicing applies (1.2a). But when the target follows the boundary, s-voicing may or may not apply, even if the structural description of s-voicing is met (1.2b, c).
1.2

a. di[z]-onesto ‘dishonest’

di[z]-ugale ‘unequal’

b. re-[z]istenza ‘resistance’

pre-[z]entire ‘to have a presentiment’

c. a-[s]ociale ‘asocial’

bi-[s]essuale ‘bisexual’

pre-[s]entire ‘to hear in advance’

The unexpected blocking of s-voicing in 1.2c is in sharp contrast with the items in 1.2b where z surfaces intervocalically, following the phonological norm of the language. Nespor and Vogel (1986) pointed out that the crucial difference between the items in 1.2b and 1.2c lies in the lexical status of the stem to which the prefix is attached; in 1.2c the stem occurs as an independent word (sociale, sessuale, etc.) whereas in 1.2b it does not (*sistenza, etc.). Following this view, Kenstowicz (1996) claimed that there is a lexico-morphological pressure from the independently occurring stem to surface its derivative as similar as possible. The presence of such an independently occurring immediate constituent is thus crucial in computing the phonology of a morphologically complex item. Kenstowicz dubbed this generalization Base-Identity; the base forces its derivative to be formally as similar as possible in order to “improve the transparency of morphological relationships between words and enhance lexical access” (Kenstowicz, 1996: 372).
1.3 Base-Identity: Given an input structure [X Y] output candidates are evaluated for how well they match [X] and [Y] if the latter occur as independent words. (Kenstowicz, 1996: 372)
The languages in East Asia provide an interesting test for this generalization. Languages as Korean or Japanese show a systematic difference in the composition of verbs and nouns; while verbal stems always surface with a morphological extension, nominal stems may surface without such an extension. This means that complex words formed from a nominal stem always have an independently occurring base to which they phonologically should conform, whereas verbal derivatives lack such a base and hence should not show such conformity. This prediction is borne out in Korean in which derivatives of nominal and verbal stems are subject to different phonology (Kenstowicz, 1996. See section 2.3 below.). In this paper, I discuss another language of East Asia, Nivkh, which also has an asymmetric composition of nouns and verbs like Korean and Japanese. I will focus on two phonological phenomena, Consonant Alternation and Final Fricative Devoicing and show that both phenomena exhibit asymmetries between nominal and verbal phonology. I will discuss each case in detail and argue that Base-Identity is the driving force of these asymmetries.

The article is organized as follows. I will start with a descriptive sketch of Consonant Alternation (section 2.1) and then illustrate the exceptional behavior of nominal stems as a case of noun-verb asymmetry (section 2.2). While most previous works, including my own, somehow stipulated the asymmetric behavior of nominal and verbal stems, I will argue that Base-Identity provides a superior analysis which is free from such a stipulation. Section 3 discusses the second phenomenon, Final Fricative Devoicing. I will illustrate the asymmetric behavior of fricative-final nominal and verbal stems when followed by a suffix. The pattern of asymmetry is as in CA: while verbal phonology is subject to canonical phonology, nominal phonology is not. Section 4 concludes.