Moraic prefixes and suffixes in Anywa

Abstract Morphological subtraction, shortening and polarity pose a major problem for a concatenative approach to the morphology–phonology interface (Anderson, 1992; Wolf, 2005, 2007; Alber and Arndt-Lappe, 2012). In this paper, I show that two of the best-documented instances of these processes, vowel shortening and vowel length polarity in Anywa (Reh, 1993) follow from the concatenative affixation of floating moras and general phonological constraints under the assumption of an autosegmental version of Optimality Theory which adopts the Radical Containment assumption: underlying phonological elements and association lines may not be literally deleted in output representations. Under this approach, it becomes unnecessary to derive these effects by morphophonological rules or morpheme-specific constraints on paradigmatic distinctness such as Antifaithfulness (Alderete, 1999, 2001) or Kurisuʹs (2001) version of Realize Morpheme. The difference between shortening and polarity can be reduced to a standard property of bound morphemes: polarizing affixes in Anywa are prefixes, shortening affixes are suffixes.