Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-tnzcf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-13T10:18:03.446Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Aggressive reduplication and dissimilation in Sundanese

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Juliet Stanton
Juliet Stanton*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, New York University, 10 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003
*
stanton@nyu.edu
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the 'Save PDF' action button.

Most cases of long-distance consonant dissimilation can be characterized as local (occurring across a vowel) or unbounded (occurring at all distances). The only known exception is rhotic dissimilation in Sundanese (Cohn 1992; Bennett 2015a,b), which applies in certain non-local contexts only. Following a suggestion by Zuraw (2002:433), I show that the pattern can be analyzed in a co-occurrence-based framework (Suzuki 1998) by invoking two unbounded co-occurrence constraints, *[r],..[r] and *[l]…[1], whose effects in local contexts are obscured by a drive for identity between adjacent syllables. Statistical trends in the lexicon are consistent with this analysis. I compare the predictions of this analysis to those of Bennett's (2015a,b) and suggest that the present proposal is preferable.

Keywords

dissimilationaggressive reduplicationphonotacticslexical statistics

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonological Data and Analysis , Volume 2 , Issue 5 , 2020, pp. 1 - 35
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
Published by the Linguistic Society of America with permission of the author under a CC BY 3.0 license.
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Juliet Stanton

Footnotes

*

For helpful feedback I am grateful to Gillian Gallagher, Maria Gouskova, Megan Crowhurst, and two anonymous reviewers. For questions I thank audiences at MIT, NYU, and the GLOW 48 Phonology Workshop, as well as the Fall 2018 Computational Phonology class at NYU. Special thanks to Abby Cohn for feedback and discussion, plus help with Sundanese resources; and to Eri Kurniawan, Ivanakbar Purwamaska, and Anhari Raushanfikri for help with glosses.

References

Alderete, John. 1997. Dissimilation as local conjunction. In Kusumoto, Kiyomi (ed.), Proceedings of the North East Linguistics Society (NELS), vol. 27, 17–32. Amherst, MA: Graduate Linguistics Student Association.Google Scholar
Anderson, Edmund A. 1997. The use of speech levels in Sundanese. In Clark, M. (ed.), Papers in Southeast Asian linguistics No. 16, 1–45. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.15144/PL-A90.1.Google Scholar
Anderson, Stephen R. 1993. 3 revenge: Clitics, morphology, and the syntax of second position. Language 69. 68–98. https://doi.org/10.2307/416416.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Becker, Michael, Ketrez, Nihan & Nevins, Andrew. 2011. The surfeit of the stimulus: Analytic biases Filter lexical statistics in Turkish laryngeal alternations. Language 87. 84–125. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2011.0016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Becker, Michael, Nevins, Andrew & Levine, Jonathan. 2012. Asymmetries in generalizing alternations to and from initial syllables. Language 88. 231–268. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2012.0049.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckman, Jill N. 1998. Positional faithfulness. Amherst, MA: UMass Amherst dissertation.Google Scholar
Bennett, William G. 2015a. Assimilation, dissimilation, and surface correspondence in Sundanese. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 33. 371–415. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9268-2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennett, William G. 2015b. The phonology of consonants: Harmony, dissimilation, and correspondence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139683586.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohn, Abigail C. 1992. The consequences of dissimilation in Sundanese. Phonology 9. 199–220. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0952675700001585.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohn, Abigail C. 2005. Truncation in Indonesian: Evidence for violable minimal words and ANCHOR-RIGHT. In Moulton, Keir & Wolf, Matthew (eds.), North East Linguistic Society (NELS), vol. 34, 372381. Amherst, MA: Graduate Linguistics Student Association.Google Scholar
Downing, Laura. 1998. On the prosodic misalignment of onsetless syllables. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 16. 1–52. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005968714712.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eringa, Fokko Siebold. 1949. Loetoeng Kasaroeng: Een mythologisch verhaal uit West-Java. Bijdrage tot de Soendase taal- en letterkunde. ’S-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff.Google Scholar
Ewing, Michael. 1991. Plural concord in Sundanese. Paper presented at the 6th International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, Honolulu.Google Scholar
Fallon, Paul D. 1993. Liquid dissimilation in Georgian. In Kathol, Andreas & Bernstein, Michael (eds.), Proceedings of the 10th Eastern States Conference on Linguistics (ESCOL), 105–116. Ithaca, NY: DMLL Publications.Google Scholar
Foley, William A. 1991. The Yimas language of New Guinea. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Gillian. 2013. Learning the identity effect as an artificial language: Bias and generalization. Phonology 31. 1–43. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0952675713000134.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Gillian & Coon, Jessica. 2009. Distinguishing total and partial identity: Evidence from Chol. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 27. 545–582. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-009-9075-3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelman, Andrew & Hill, Jennifer. 2006. Data analysis using regression and multilevel/hierarchical models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511790942.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gouskova, Maria & Gallagher, Gillian. 2020. Inducing nonlocal constraints from baseline phonotactics. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 38. 77–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-019-09446-x.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hansson, Gunnar Ólafur. 2001. Theoretical and typological issues in consonant harmony. Berkeley, CA: University of California, Berkeley dissertation.Google Scholar
Hansson, Gunnar Ólafur. 2010. Consonant harmony: Long-distance interaction in phonology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Holton, David. 1995. Assimilation and dissimilation of Sundanese liquids. In Beckman, Jill, Walsh-Dickey, Laura & Urbanczyk, Suzanne (eds.), Papers in Optimality Theory, vol. 18 (University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers). Amherst, MA.: Graduate Student Linguistics Association.Google Scholar
Kroeger, Paul R. 1989. Discontinuous reduplication in vernacular Malay. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistic Society (BLS) 15. 193–202. https://doi.org/10.3765/bls.v15i0.1742.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Basa, Lembaga & Sunda, Sastra. 1985. Kamus umum basa Sunda. Indonesia: Penerbit Tarate Bandung.Google Scholar
MacEachern, Margaret. 1997. Laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions. Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles dissertation.Google Scholar
Martin, Andrew Thomas. 2007. The evolving lexicon. Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles dissertation.Google Scholar
McMullin, Kevin & Hansson, Gunnar Ólafur. 2016. Computational and learnability properties of conflicting long-distance dependencies. Talk presented at the 24th Manchester Phonology Meeting.Google Scholar
McMullin, Kevin & Hansson, Gunnar Ólafur. 2019. Inductive learning of locality relations in segmental phonology. Laboratory Phonology 10. 14. https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Myers, Scott. 1997. OCP effects in Optimality Theory. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 15. 847892. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005875608905.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet. 2003. Probabilistic phonology: Discrimination and robustness. In Bod, Rens, Hay, Jennifer & Jannedy, Stefanie (eds.), Probabilistic linguistics, 177–228. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robins, R. H. 1959. Nominal and verbal derivation in Sundanese. Lingua 8. 337–369. https://doi.org/10.1016/0024-3841(59)90035-X.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Sharon & Walker, Rachel. 2004. A Typology of consonant agreement as correspondence. Language 80. 475–531. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2004.0144.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scannell, Kevin P. 2007. The Crúbadán Project: Corpus building for under-resourced languages. Cahiers du Cental 5. 1–10.Google Scholar
Stanton, Juliet. 2016a. Latin -alis/-aris and segmental blocking in dissimilation. Ms., MIT, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Stanton, Juliet. 2016b. Review of Bennett (2015b). Phonology 33. 533–544. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0952675716000233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stanton, Juliet. 2017. Segmental blocking in dissimilation: An argument for co-occurrence constraints. In Jesney, Karen, O’Hara, Charlie, Smith, Caitlin & Walker, Rachel (eds.), Proceedings of the 2016 Meeting on Phonology. Washington, DC: Linguistic Society of America. https://doi.org/10.3765/amp.v4i0.3972.Google Scholar
Suzuki, Keiichiro. 1998. A typological investigation of dissimilation. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona dissertation. https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3NC601H.Google Scholar
Suzuki, Keiichiro. 1999. Identity avoidance vs. identity preference: The case of Sundanese. Paper presented at the 73rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Van Syoc, Wayland Bryce. 1959. The phonology and morphology of the Sundanese language. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan dissertation.Google Scholar
Wickham, Hadley. 2016. ggplot2: Elegant graphics for data analysis. New York: Springer-Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-98141-3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Colin & Obdeyn, Marieke. 2009. Simplifying subsidiary theory: Statistical evidence from Arabic, Muna, Shona, and Wargamay. Ms., Johns Hopkins University.Google Scholar
Yutani, Hiroaki. 2018. gghighlight: Highlight lines and points in ‘ggplot2’. Software package. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/gghighlight/index.html.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zuraw, Kie. 2002. Aggressive reduplication. Phonology 19. 395–439. https://doi.org/10.1017/S095267570300441X.CrossRefGoogle Scholar