A Study in Diachronic Morphophonemics: The Ukrainian Prefixes

Abstract

Over the last eight centuries the morphophonemic rules relevant to prefixes in Ukrainian have undergone a number of changes which are here defined and dated relative to one another. The changes are then categorized typologically, and the mechanism of change involved in two of the types is discussed in detail. It is shown that the direction of change in morphophonemics is determined by different synchronic relations between rules and marked lexical items. The changes analysed permit important inferences about the abstractness of phonological representations.