What determines which phonemes appear in which morphemes? The predominant answer to this question has long been that the content of morphemes is arbitrary, i.e. a language that uses /kæt/ to mean ‘cat’ and /dɔɡ/ to mean ‘dog’ is no more well-formed than a language that uses /kæt/ to mean ‘dog’ and /dɔɡ/ to mean ‘cat’. Several types of exceptions to this have been discussed in the literature, including the iconicity of onomatopoeia and many morphemes in signed languages, phonaesthemes (sound sequences that recur in clusters of lexical items), and systematicity (language-specific correlations between e.g. prosodic templates and word classes).

This talk will present preliminary ideas about an additional alternative source of phoneme-morpheme mapping, namely structural constraints that reduce the logical possibilities of phonological patterns, specifically in intonation. These constraints will be explored through a de novoanalysis using the toolset of Optimality Theory to encode the structural forces that likely shape intonational contours in the world’s languages. In doing so, several core concepts from segmental phonology are revisited as applications to intonational phonology, including sonority and the division of speech sounds into phonemes.

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