Prosodic Morphology

The phrase ‘prosodic morphology’ refers to a class of linguistic phenomena in which prosodic structure affects morphological form. These phenomena include reduplication, infixation, root-and-pattern morphology, and truncation. A key notion in the analysis of prosodic morphology is the prosodic template, a type of morpheme that consists of a prosodic unit devoid of segmental structure. The filling of the template with segmental material from a basic word produces a morphologically derived word. For example, in Ilokano the prosodic template consists of a heavy syllable. It is filled reduplicatively, by copying the segments from the singular noun sufficient to create a heavy syllable: pusa ‘cat’, pus-pusa ‘cats’.