Morphophonology of the completive aspect in San Pablo Güilá Zapotec

Abstract

In San Pablo Güilá Zapotec, as in other Zapotec languages, the completive forms of inflected verbs manifest allomorphy both in the completive prefix (which has two phonological forms, /b-/ and /w-/) as well as in a set of suppletive verbal roots, slightly greater than three dozen items. There is also a small set of irregular verbs (10 in total) in which it is not possible to separate the stem from the completive prefix because they are completely merged. In this work I argue that both the choice of the allomorph of the completive prefix and the choice of the allomorphs of the suppletive roots follow a set of phonological and morphophonological well-formedness conditions, within which the avoidance of the sequence b-b, two /b/ across a morpheme boundary, and the sequence b(-)a , either in the same morphological domain /ba/, or across a morpheme boundary /b-a/, are evident. For the analysis, the distinction between allomorphy and allophony is crucial, as well as the consideration of the phonological articulator of the initial segments of the roots, whether they are consonants or vowels (cf. Clements 1993, Clements and Hume 1995). I formalize this analysis in optimality theory and subsequently extend the analysis to compound and derived verbal stems. I conclude that the postulation of verbal classes motivated by the allomorphy of the completive is not necessary.