Somali and the Nature of Morphophonological Alternations

Somali is an East Cushitic language spoken in the Horn of Africa, with determiner morphemes whose initial consonants undergo interesting phonological alternations when suffixed onto noun stems. This could be described as a type of “derived environment contact phenomena,” as the changes in these suffix-initial consonants are totally dependent on the final segment of the stem and are not active in other types of derived environments or within roots. In this paper I examine the alternations these determiner morphemes undergo when suffixed in different positions, sketching OT approaches to describe the phonological processes and developing a cophonological model that isolates each set of phonological alternations to its respective morphological environment. §2 lists the segment inventory of Somali and describes the transcription system utilized in this paper. §3 presents the first set of determiner-suffix alternations, while §4 discusses some properties of morphophonological alternations that could be problematic for an OT approach. §5 examines the first set of determiner-suffix alternations, with a “brute-force” OT approach in §5.1 and a scales model in §5.2. §6 introduces the second set of alternations, which are then analyzed with a scales approach in §7. Finally, §8 sketches a method for unifying the analyses of each set of alternations into a cophonological model, and §9 concludes the paper.