The Analysis of the Plural Morpheme in Mamasani Lori Dialect: Optimality Approach

The Lori language and its various dialects are a branch of southwestern Iranian dialects. In Mamasani Lori dialect, like many other Iranian dialects, the morphophonological processes have significant varieties. . This study has investigated the morphophonological processes resulting from the addition of the plural morpheme / -æl / to the nominal stems in this dialect based on the framework of optimality approach and answered the following questions:1) What are the allomorphs of plural morpheme in this dialect? What processes, constraints, and rankings govern the alternations, phonetic realizations of optimal outputs resulting from the addition of the plural morpheme to stems?

The present study is descriptive-analytical and the method of data collection was field study; in this way, a list of names as well as noun substitute adjectives in the studied dialect was extracted by recording hours of interviews and conversations of the native speakers. Its various contexts have been identified in the sample of the studied data based on the authors’ intuitive linguistic knowledge and the theoretical basis of the research. Data were transcribed based on the ɪnternational Phonetic Alphabet and all plural morpheme textures in these data were analyzed.

In this study, the singular nominal stems ending in consonant are changed to their plural forms by adding the plural morpheme / æl / to them. In this process, by re-syllabification, the onset position of the plural morpheme is filled. The Alignment constraint (ALIGN-R) governs the re- syllabification process, in which the alignment constraint is violated to satisfy the dominating high ranked ONSET constraint. In the hiatus context of the addition of nouns ending in the phonetic chain / jæ / and the plural morpheme / - æl /, first the insertion process of intrusive consonant / j / is occurred and then deletion process is happened based on dissimilation process and under the OCP constraint. The insertion process is used to prevent the hiatus of the nominative stem vowels and the plural morpheme / -æl / vowel, and is used in the chain or phonetic context, for example at the boundary of the nominal stems ending in the vowel / ɑ: / and the plural morpheme vowel, in which Deletion process is not applicable. In this study, the glide / j / is considered to be the underlying intrusive consonant based on the common phonetic features of the vowels and / j /, which as a result of assimilating with vowel of  the stems ending in / u: / is realized as labial glide / w / and In two cases it becomes / -ɟ / due to  partial assimilation with nasal consonant of the stems and also it is realized as / n / in the other two stems under complete assimilating process with  nasal consonant of the stems. Another assimilating process occurs as a result of the adjacency of the final vowel of the nominal stems ending in / æ / with the intrusive consonant / j /, which changes the final vowel of the nominal stem into the vowel / ɪ /. Discussion &

The findings showed that the constraints HIATUS, ONSET and NUC have the highest ranks in the morpho-phonological analysis of plural morpheme with combination of the nouns of Mamasani Lori dialect and Violation of these constraints is fatal and leads to the production of non-optimal choices/candidates in this dialect.