Lak Reduplication: Neither Morphological Nor Phonological Fixed Segmentism∗

Lak is a Northeast Caucasian language spoken by over 150,000 people in the central highlands of the Republic of Dagestan in the Russian Federation. It utilizes reduplication in certain durative verb forms, notably imperatives, the present participle (both short and full forms), the present gerund, and the assertive present and conditional forms (Murkelinskij 1971:187; Khajdakov 1962:410-416). This reduplication can be described as in Friedman (1989), “[I]n progressive verbs, certain affixes, which all have a linking vowel /i/, trigger reduplication of the root consonant nearest to the inflectional affix [. . . ].” This paper argues that the surface value of the “linking vowel” following the reduplicant as /i/ cannot adequately be accounted for by phonological or morphological fixed segmentism as described in Alderete et al. (1999) and therefore offers a challenge to that theory. Section 1 presents examples of reduplication in Lak along with a complete morphological parse of each form presented. After this discussion of the data, the second section argues for the benefits of an Optimality Theoretic analysis, which serve as the motivation for this work. The third section introduces the markedness constraints that influence the shape and placement of the reduplicant. Then, The fourth section goes on to explain the constraints that motivate the analysis of /i/ as a fixed segment whose quality is shaped by TETU. Next, the fifth section compiles these findings by providing constraint rankings with tableaux and explaining the reasoning behind them. Finally, the sixth and seventh sections will discuss the relevance of the theory of fixed segmentism (Alderete et al. 1999) to this analysis.