In this talk I address the issue of how phonology and morphology interact in a highly agglutinative language (lu-Ganda) and language family (Bantu). The issue is whether the phonological facts support an "interactionist" view of this interface, with progressive morphology-phonology interleaving, i.e. add an affix, do some phonology, add another affix, repeat the phonology. Attention will be on verb structure, which, as shown below, may be quite complex:

     (i)    Word =  prefixes + stem
     (ii)   Stem  =  ROOT + suffixes
     (iii)  Example (stem in brackets, root capitalized):

         a-ba-ta-li-      [ FUMB-ir-agan-a ]     'they who will not cook for
        IV-they-neg-fut     cook-appl-e.o.-FV            each other'
         (IV = initial vowel morpheme; FV = final vowel morpheme)

In previous work on lu-Ganda (Hyman and Katamba 1991) and ci-Bemba (Hyman 1995), we have shown that the stem-level ("stratum 1") suffixal morphology and phonology are cyclic, a demonstration that can be extended to many other Bantu languages. In this paper I shift attention to the nature of the morphology-phonology interface in prefixation (hence at the word level, "stratum 2"). The question in this paper, then, is whether the "slot-and-filler"-type prefixes show the same kind of cyclic effects as suffixes or whether the prefixal phonology is non-cyclic, as generally assumed. I will show that here too there are cyclic effects, though of quite a different type. Complex facts from root-initial y/Ø alternation establish not only the unimportance of "slots" in prefix morphology-phonology interactions, but also that these, although cyclic in a sense to be discussed, must not be handled in a "compositional" manner. Specifically, stratum 1 (stem) and stratum 2 (word) intersensitivities argue for an integrated interface, where all requirements are checked at the same time. This result is of course consistent with the move away from procedural derivationality and towards direct-mapping approaches to grammar.

References

• Hyman, Larry M. 1995. "Cyclic phonology and morphology in Cibemba". In J. Cole and Charles Kisseberth (eds.), Perspectives in Phonology, 81-112. Stanford: C.S.L.I.
• Hyman, Larry M. and Francis X. Katamba. 1993. "Cyclicity and suffix doubling in the Bantu verb stem." In Special Session on African Language Structures, 134-144. Berkeley Linguistic Society 17.