A'ingae reduplication is phonologically optimizing

Abstract

In this paper, I describe and analyze reduplication in A’ingae (ISO 639-3: con), an understudied and endangered Amazonian isolate. The reduplicant is a suffix -ʔσ, where ʔ is a fixed segment and σ is a syllable copied from the right edge of the word. Only disyllabic roots can be reduplicated, and the disyllabic root is parsed as a trochaic foot in the surface form. If the second syllable of the root is a diphthong, it undergoes monophthongization in the base. I model these properties with a reduplicant-specific cophonology (e.g. Orgun, 1996), which consists of a ranking of constraints motivated elsewhere in the language’s grammar. Thus, I demonstrate that A’ingae reduplication is phonologically optimizing. All the data were collected by the author.