Join the Linguistics Department for Maria Gouskova’s talk “Infixing Reduplication: Connecting Shape and Position”.

It is a matter of some disagreement whether phonological theory should aim to rule out unattested languages, and if so, how. Some theories are explicitly oriented toward typological restrictiveness, while others accept some overgeneration. In the latter view, the rare and unattested languages are ruled out by forces of language change or learnability considerations.

I am taking the position that typological generalizations do need to be derived, and my empirical domain is the well-studied problem of reduplication. Reduplication is subject to a number of typological generalizations, which have received varying degrees of attention in phonological theory. In Gouskova & Kasenov (2026), we challenge a counterexample to Moravcsik’s Generalization, which holds that no language copies the syllable structure of the base into the reduplicant. In the present talk, I focus on infixing reduplication, which respects two generalizations: first, reduplicated infixes never show total copying (as in /krunita/ –> [kruni<krunita>ta]). Second, only reduplicative infixes, and not segmental ones, show the distribution “after the first onsetless syllable”, as in Timugon Murut [bulud]~[bu-bulud], [ulampoy] ~ [u<la>lampoy] (McCarthy & Prince 1993, Prosodic Morphology).

I develop an approach to infixation within Serial Template Satisfaction, a theory of reduplication within Harmonic Serialism (McCarthy, Kimper and Mullin 2012). This theory is less powerful in several ways than the dominant constraint-based alternative, Base-Reduplicant Correspondence Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1995), and it has several other attractive characteristics, such as the ability to handle opacity in reduplicative copying (Gouskova & Kasenov 2026). But infixing reduplication is not yet worked out in this theory—a gap I aim to fill, while also keeping an eye on the generalizations noted above. The key ingredients toward deriving these generalizations include (a) excluding “pivot” constraints, which demand opposite-edge alignment between morphemes and phonological structure (contra Pivot Theory, Yu 2007 et seq), (b) identifying constraints that can favor the repositioning of templatic morphemes before they have been filled by copying. I demonstrate on several case studies that these goals can be achieved without overgenerating.

This event is in-person with an option to join virtually via Zoom.