| dc.description |
Choctaw verbs form intensives by a complex procedure of (apparent) infixation, gemination and accentuation. Verbs of all shapes have two distinct intensive forms, which Ulrich (1986) distinguishes as the y-grade (involving a geminate yy) and the g-grade (involving gemination of a stem consonant or a falling tone). Lombardi & McCarthy (1991) analyse Choctaw intensives in terms of the theory of prosodic circumscription (McCarthy & Prince 1990). Hammond (1993) gives an alternative analysis within the same theory. While insightful in certain respects, these analyses fail to account for the full range of Choctaw intensives, instead generating a single intensive for any verb. In the present paper, I propose a unified analysis of Choctaw intensives, with two, minimally different, procedures for generating the two intensives of any verb. |
