Emergent templates: the unusual case of Tiene

Tiene is unusual among Bantu languages in imposing prosodic restrictions on derivational verb morphology. The Tiene verb stem fits the Bantu mold: a CV(C) root combines with zero or more -VC derivational suffixes and an obligatory final vowel. However, Tiene requires derived stems to be either CVVCV or CVCVCV, where C2 and C3 agree in nasality, C2 is coronal, and C3 is grave. The latter constraints drive infixation when the root ends in a grave consonant and the suffix is coronal. An Optimality Theory analysis is provided which derives the two templates, furthering McCarthy and Prince's (1994) program of prosodic morphology in Optimality Theory. The data have an interesting added theoretical implication. As Tiene shows, segmental (rather than prosodic) conditions can force infixation, bringing up the question of how Optimality Theory is to capture the well-known generalization that infixes are never more than one prosodic (rather than segmental) constituent away from a word edge.