Infixal Nominal Reduplication in Mangarayi

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze nominal reduplication in MaNarayi, an Aboriginal language spoken in the Northwest Territory of Australia.Nominal reduplication in MaNarayi does not conform to any purely prosodic template, suggesting either an analysis with no prosodic template (as in Merlan 1982) or one with a violable prosodic template (as in McCarthy and Prince 1993b and 1995b).We explore both analyses in the framework of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993), concluding that both analyses adequately account for the data.However, we provide theoretical arguments against the templatic analysis, arguing that reduplication is best explained a-templatically. This paper has benefited from the helpful comments and suggestions of Suzanne Lyon, Armin Mester, Jason Riggle, Adam Ussishkin, and the participants in the UCSC Phonology Interest Group, though of course, the authors are solely responsible for the content of this paper.The authors names appear in alphabetical order; comments can be directed to either author. 1 The distribution of these suffixes is not important to the analysis, so they will be ignored in this paper. 2In the gloss, M=mother, F=father, B=brother, Z=sister, C=child, and S=son, with combinations taken one by one as a string of possessives (e.g.MMBC=mothers mothers brothers child).