Multiple-Feature Mutation and Realize Morpheme

Wolf (2005; 2007) argues that the realization of featural affixes in mutation morphology is triggered by the constraint MaxFlt which requires that phonological material not linked to a root node (“floating features”) is fully preserved in the output. As evidence that the realization of floating features cannot be achieved by the weaker, but more general constraint Realize Morpheme (van Oostendorp 2005), Wolf adduces cases where a single morphological category seems to involve mutation for multiple phonological features. In this paper, I show that the data Wolf cites are in fact morphologically complex, and exhibit well-behaved single-feature mutation under an appropriate morphological analysis. It follows that Realize Morpheme fully obviates MaxFlt for mutation.