Coda conditions and um infixation in Toba Batak

This paper examines the concatenative behaviour of the affix um in two varieties of Toba Batak and compares the Toba Batak case to its more familiar counterpart in Tagalog. Beyond the interest a comparison between Tagalog and Toba Batak holds for typology, the OT analysis proposed for Toba Batak contributes to the ongoing theoretical discussion of constraints and their evaluation. First, Toba Batak requires that several constraints be co-ranked. When constraints are co-ranked, their violations count equally in the evaluation of candidates, as though the co-ranked constraints inhabited the same cell of the OT tableau. Second, an OT analysis which captures the behaviour of the cognate morpheme um in both Tagalog and Toba Batak by simply re-ranking a few constraints compels an approach in which, for the cases examined, the work of NoCoda is performed by the combined activity of the two independently motivated constraints *Geminate and a CodaCond constraint targeting root nodes. The theoretical interest of this approach is that it suggests that NoCoda, the absolute suppression of phonological content in coda position, could be reconciled with a class of relativised CodaCond constraints, which individually result in the suppression of specific features or structural nodes.