Voicing Polarity in Luo

Alderete (2001) cites voicing alternations in Luo plural and possession marking as compelling evidence for transderivational antifaithfulness (TAF) constraints. In this paper, I show that a TAF analysis of Luo plural formation meets empirical problems, and argue for an alternative approach based on the interaction of faithfulness and markedness constraints in a containmentbased version of Optimality Theory (van Oostendorp, 2006b; Revithiadou, 2007). The Luo data which have been taken as decisive evidence for a genuinely non-additive type of morphology turn out to be fully compatible with a conception of morphology which is broadly concatenative. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses the data from Luo plural formation as they have been generally received in the literature, and introduces the details of Alderete’s analysis. In section 3, I develop a fuller picture of the plural data, and argue that the antifaithfulness approach makes predictions which are not borne out, but also fails to capture significant restrictions on voicing alternations. The formal framework assumed in this paper is introduced in section 4. An alternative analysis of the plural data is developed in section 5, and extended to voicing alternations in possessive constructions in section 6. In section 7, I compare the analysis with other reductionist approaches to Luo voicing polarity. Section 8 discusses the repercussions of the obtained results for phonological theory.