The Nature of Subtractive Processes in Morphology
This article discusses several important phonological issues concerning subtractive processes in morphology. First, this article addresses the scope of subtractive processes that linguistic theories should be concerned with. Many subtractive processes fall in the realm of grammatical theories. Subsequently, previous processual and affixal approaches to subtractive morphology and nonconcatenative allomorphy are reviewed. Then, theoretical restrictiveness is taken up. Proponents of the affixal view often claim that it is more restrictive than the processual view, but their argument is not convincing. We do not know enough to discuss theoretical restrictiveness. Finally, earlier analyses of subtractive morphology in parallel and serial Optimality Theory are reviewed. We have not accomplished enough in this respect, so no conclusive choice of parallelism or serialism is possible at present. As a whole, there are too many unsettled matters to conclude about the nature of subtractive processes in morphology.