Two Perspectives on Malagasy Reduplication: Derivational and Ot Analyses∗

Malagasy is an Austronesian language with a productive reduplication morphology that applies to both roots and affixed stems. In this paper, we focus on the reduplication of a class of verbs in Malagasy. These verbs often appear with an active voice marker “an-” that triggers alternation in the root-initial consonants. The reduplication of the “an”-verbs is analyzed within two different frameworks. The first analysis is rule-based, and accounts for phonological variants with variable rule ordering. This analysis is then used to construct an alternative account, from the perspective of correspondence theory – a subtheory of Optimality Theory. The strong derivational characteristics of the Malagasy data leads us to argue that although OT is perhaps a better model for language universals, phonological rule can still be valuable analytic tool for understanding reduplication.