Bare-Consonant Reduplication in Yokuts: Minimal Reduplication by Compression

Abstract

In Y okuts, a Penutian language, there is a pattern of reduplication in which the reduplicant surfaces as a copy of the first consonant and the last consonant of the root. This type of reduplication falls under the category of bare-consonant reduplication (Sloan 1988, Hendricks 1999), which is characterized as being a single consonant C, or a string of two consonants CC. Such examples of reduplication are incompatible with analyses in which the shape of the reduplicant is defined by a prosodic template constraint. In this paper, I present data illustrating this pattern of reduplication in Y okuts and show how this data cannot be accounted for in Optimality Theory by a prosodic template. Also, I will provide an analysis without a template constraint, consistent with current accounts of reduplication (McCarthy & Prince 1994, 1997; Gafos 1997; Walker 1998; Nelson, to appear; Urbanczyk, to appear). This analysis is based on a compression model (Hendricks 1999), where the shape of the reduplicant is determined by constraints that determine morpheme ordering.