Part-of-speech matching in A’ingae phonological overriding

A’ingae (or Cofán, ISO 639-3: con) is an Amazonian isolate characterized by complex grammatical interactions between metrical stress and glottal stops. In this paper, I document and analyze cases where phonological dominance (i.e. the overriding of stress/ʔ otherwise predictably triggered by a subset of suffixes) is blocked if the base of affixation has inflectional morphology associated with a different part of speech than the dominant suffix.

The implications of this dominance blocking generalization are twofold. First, the A’ingae dataset challenges the claim that outermost morphemes always dominate over the inner ones. Second, the findings violate the principle of grammatical modularity (e.g. Chomsky, 1966), calling the common assumptions about grammatical interfaces into question.