Introduction

Up to this unit, we have focused on phonological problems such as distributional restrictions and morphophonemic puzzles such as alternation. Although alternation impacts the phonological forms of words and their internal constituents, the studies of alternation concern the phonological changes caused by morphological processes such as affixation. These phonological changes, while affecting the surface forms of morphological units, generally do not determine how words are formed. Starting from this chapter, we shift our focus away from phonological issues to consider problems of word formation, the central concern of morphology. There is an area of study within morphology that investigates how morphological units take the phonological or prosodic forms they do. This area of morphology is known as prosodic morphology. Prosodic morphology seeks to identify and explain the patterns in how the prosodic shapes of morphological units come about from the ways they are constructed. To illustrate some of the prosodic morphology concerns, we introduce a puzzle from Arabic, in which the plural forms of nouns are built not from concatenating phonological materials to the left or right of the base such as suffixation in English. They appear to be constructed through modifying the base internally, giving rise to the description of this area of study as nonconcatenative morphology. In addition, these broken plurals exhibit a fixed shape, regardless of the base forms from which they are formed. We present two analyses: the template-and-circumscription account of McCarthy and Prince (1990) and the parafixation-and-transfer account in Hammond (1988). Even though both proposals use templates to explain the fixed shape of broken plurals (which leads linguists to describe it as templatic morphology as well), they differ radically in their views of how broken plurals are constructed. Thus, these analyses highlight many of the issues posed by problems of templatic morphology.