A Construction Morphology account for Ancient Greek accentuation

Abstract

Word formation is often considered in many phonological studies to involve concatenation of morphemes. However, a morpheme-based morphological analysis runs into difficulties when dealing with accentuation patterns in Ancient Greek. On the one hand, Ancient Greek adjectives suffixed with -es and -to show different accentuation patterns that cannot be easily accounted for by assigning accentual properties to the morphemes they contain. On the other hand, forms with contracted vowels show that the assignment of lexical accent and default accent occurs at different cycles in phonology. This paper proposes a word-based model that is developed within the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij 2005; 2007; 2010) for phonological analysis: word formation is based on analogical parallelism among morphologically related word forms, which is modeled as the instantiation of schemata. Accentual properties are considered idiosyncrasies of schemata, and the observed accentuation patterns can be accounted for via two cycles within the Optimality Theory (OT) framework.