The phonology of Anatolian reduplication

Abstract

In this paper we develop a synchronic and diachronic analysis of the phonology of partial reduplication in the Anatolian branch of Indo-European. We argue that the reduplicative patterns of Hittite and Luwian differ from Proto-Anatolian, which exhibited an asymmetric treatment of verbal stems with initial consonant clusters: full copying of sibilant-stop clusters, but partial copying of stop-sonorant clusters. We contend that the phonological constraint driving this asymmetry, No Poorly-Cued Repetitions (Zukoff 2017a), was demoted within the separate prehistories of Hittite and Luwian due to independent phonological changes eliminating the distinction between these cluster types. Furthermore, we show that the proposed set of diachronic constraint re-rankings in Hittite and Luwian can be explained under Maximally Informative Recursive Constraint Demotion, a minor reformulation of the Recursive Constraint Demotion algorithm (RCD; Tesar 1995, Tesar and Smolensky 1998, 2000) that favors the high ranking of maximally informative winner-preferring constraints.