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Russian palatalization and the <em>e~’o</em> alternation in Stratal Phonology

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Palatalization processes and the e ~ ’o alternation are both classic problems in Russian (morpho)phonology. It is now widely recognized that there is a relationship between the two: where suffixes are relevant to the e ~ ’o alternation, palatalizing suffixes require the front vowel in the preceding morpheme, and non-palatalizing suffixes require the back vowel (see particularly Itkin 1994). This strongly suggests a phonological analysis of the e ~ ’o alternation, which has hitherto proven elusive, primarily since there is no principled, non-circular account of apparent lexical exceptions and of suffixes that are neutral for the purposes of the alternation. In this talk I argue that such an account is possible within Stratal Phonology (e.g. Bermúdez-Otero 2018), which quite precisely predicts the consilience of phonological, morphological and semantic domain structure observed in the data

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