Phonological implications of skeleton and feature underspecification in Kasem

The West African language Kasem, which is spoken by the Kasenas on both sides of the northern border between Ghana and Burkina Faso, figured prominently in the abstractness controversy in the late seventies. The analyses proposed by Halle (1978) and Phelps (1975, 1979), in particular, show most clearly that the framework of linear phonology does not provide a suitable model for the description of the complex set of alternations that can be observed in the nominal system of this language. I will argue that the theory of underspecification (cf. Kiparsky 1982, 1985; Archangeli 1984; among others) together with the principles of CV phonology (cf. McCarthy 1979, 1981; Clements & Keyser 1983; Levin 1985) provide the necessary equipment to account for the Kasem facts in a relatively simple and insightful way. It will turn out that these subtheories enable us to collapse several seemingly independent processes into a rather small set of language-specific rules.