Interaction of Phonology and Morphology in Maltese and Makassarese Clitics

This paper presents two case studies in which surface phonological form is determined by an interaction of phonological and morphological information and processes. In both Makassarese (South Sulawesi, Austronesian) and Maltese (Semitic) the attachment of certain clitics to a host results in an asymmetry in phonological behavior. The phonological form of these host-clitic structures is sensitive to both the morphology of the clitic (that is, not all clitics show this behavior) and to the phonological shape of the host. To analyze this data, I propose a framework, following Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993, et. seq.), in which the triggers for the application of phonological processes are specific morphosyntactic structures and processes. One such morphosyntactic process, Local Dislocation, is known to be conditioned by phonological information about the objects to which it applies. The interleaving of Vocabulary Insertion, which results in available phonological material, Linearization and Local Dislocation result in a framework which has a complicated but restricted interaction of phonological and morphological information. With this framework, the data in the case studies can be explained with one simple morphological process and a few simple phonological rules.