Moraic Affixes and Morphological Colors in Dinka

Dinka has two patterns of vowel-lengthening morphology: lengthening by one mora and imposition of a bimoraic template. Flack (2007) claims that these data provide conclusive evidence for morphemespecific indexed markedness constraints. In this article, I reanalyze the Dinka data in Colored Containment Theory (van Oostendorp 2006), effectively showing that the Dinka data are consistent with a more restrictive approach to the morphology-phonology interface: a markedness constraint may not refer to specific morphemes; rather, it may refer only to morphological colors (i.e., whether two phonological objects are part of the same morpheme or not).