LING 331 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Front Vowel, Perfective Aspect, Diphthong
Document Summary
Important: no one ever says an underlying form. Commonality/naturalness: vowel deletion in these cases is very common (string of many vowels: hiatus), but inserting a vowel is much less common process when there are already several vowels placed one after the other. There are consonants that show up in the perfective form and do not show up in the simple form. An underlying consonant deletes in a particular environment (consonants at the end of the word) [l, f, , s, t, m, ]/v___v. The consonants are not present in the underlying form, but get added in when we produce the perfective form. Problem: no environment seems exclusive to any consonant. Intuition: this phonological process does not make sense (it"s not accurate; it"s not small; it"s not natural; it"s not found in other languages). The underlying representation (ur) in samoan is not just the pronunciation of the /simple/ form. Ur in samoan is not just the perfective minus the suffix /ia/.
