Sound Mutations: The Morphophonology of Chaha (review)

This book, which grew out of the author’s 1997 dissertation from the Université du Québec à Montréal, is a thorough discussion and analysis of certain aspects of the phonology and morphology of Chaha, a member of the Gurage group of Ethiopian Semitic languages. The phonological discussion focuses on matters of featural representation and distribution, for which Chaha is an exceptionally rich source; the morphological discussion is restricted to a set of suffixes and clitics that mark verb agreement.

The facts of each phenomenon are presented clearly before Banksira turns to a more formal analysis, easing the way for anyone seeking primarily to explore the typological data. The theoretical devices that B deploys involve well-known approaches, in particular radical underspecification and distributed morphology, so that readers from a variety of perspectives should find the material accessible and of lasting value.

Chaha is famous in the phonological literature for the palatalization or labialization of consonants in the stem, subject to interesting cooccurrence and directionality effects, a phenomenon that illustrates the autosegmental behavior of place features in a striking way (cf. John McCarthy, ‘Consonantal morphology in the Chaha verb’, WCCFL 2.176–88, 1983). This will be most familiar to some readers as the expression of inflectional suffixes, for example, nɨk’ɨm, nɨk’^jɨm, nɨk’ɨm^w ‘collect!’ in masculine singular, feminine singular, and impersonal forms. Similar effects, often in combination, are found throughout the morphology, such as the imperative mәt’ɨs and participle m^wɨt’ɨ∫ ‘to break at once by pulling’. In contrast to McCarthy’s use of [– back,+ high] and [+ round] as the operative features, B argues for a solution with the [– back] element /I/ but also a single element /U/ which is both [round] and [high], since labialization entails palatalization.

Another particularly interesting aspect of the language, and one that is extensively discussed by B, is the paradigmatic alternation between voiced and voiceless consonants, or fricatives and stops, that historically derives from a pattern of gemination: for example, jussive -әgɨr and perfective akәr ‘to raise cattle’. The alternations, which involve pairs of segments typically found in lenition—B analyzes them as two strengthening processes, parallel to historical gemination—depend as well on the features of the following (nonadjacent) consonant, leading to interesting issues of multiple linking of features and action at a distance. By abstracting away from contexts of strengthening and relying on the autosegmental independence of the labialization and palatalization elements, B reduces the surface inventory of 38 consonants to just 16 underlying phonemes.

With its exhaustive data and careful attention to the analysis of wide-ranging facts, this book is essential for anyone interested in the morphophonology of Ethiopian Semitic and is of considerable value for its general contributions to rule typology and distinctive feature theory.