Knowledge base · Part V — Morphophonology and Sandhi · this topic as a network
31. Personal-Affix Junctural Sandhi, =an/a= Allomorphy, and Connected-Speech Reduction
How do personal affixes undergo phonological changes at morpheme boundaries, including sandhi, allomorphy, and casual speech reductions?
The ku= and ci= vowel-deletion rule
Under what conditions do the vowels of ku= and ci= delete before stem-initial vowels, and which vowel blocks deletion?
In the Saru, Chitose, and Mukawa dialects, the personal affixes ku= and ci= contract to k= and c= respectively before vowel-initial verbs or nouns, specifically before stems beginning with a, u, e, or o (Nakagawa 2024: 108, 110, 167, Nakagawa & Fukazawa 2022: 8.4). In Western Hidaka and Chitose dialects this process is described as the dropping of u and i from k(u)= and c(i)=, with the remaining consonant fusing with the following syllable (Nakagawa 2024: 167). Nakagawa 2024 further reports that in most dialects outside Saru, Chitose, and Mukawa the contraction does not occur and the two-syllable forms are retained (Nakagawa 2024: 52). Satō 2008 states more generally that the first-person singular nominative prefix ku- becomes k- before vowels other than i, with the accent shifting to the vowel syllable of the stem (Satō 2008: 110), and that the exclusive first-person plural transitive nominative prefix ci- likewise becomes c- before vowels with the accent shifting to that syllable (Satō 2008: 111).
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The /i/-initial block and vowel weakening
When a stem begins with /i/, what happens to the vowels of ku=, ci=, and e= instead of deletion?
When ku- occurs before the vowel i followed by a single consonant, the i becomes y and the accent shifts from i to u, yielding the surface form kúy- (Satō 2008: 110); the verb ipe 'to eat', for instance, surfaces as ku-ype after the first-person singular prefix (Satō 2008: 150). The second-person singular prefix e- undergoes the same process before an initial i followed by a single consonant, with i becoming y and the accent shifting to e- (Satō 2008: 111). The middle-voice and nominalizing prefix ci- loses its vowel i before a and o, paralleling the morphophonology of the first-person plural prefix ci= before those vowels (Nakagawa 2024: 592).
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Connected-speech reductions
What reductions occur in fast or casual speech involving person markers and partially lexicalized sequences?
In Shizunai Ainu, when a pronominal affix occurs more than once with two closely connected verbals, its ellipsis is permitted though not required (proposed in Refsing 1986: 24). Across word boundaries, an initial yV- sequence can drop y- after a consonant-final word, yielding a -CV- sequence (Satō 2008: 13).
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