Abstract
This thesis investigates phoneme inventory, syllable structures, reduplication patterns, and the interaction between the epenthetic vowels and reduplication in Maraqwang, Maklabay, and Matabalay. The goal of this thesis is to show that vowel epenthesis analysis is our main phonological strategy to avoid consonant cluster onsets in the surface forms to deal with partial reduplication and to form the accurate reduplication patterns in Atayal dialects. CV syllables are preferred in non-final position in Maraqwang. As for Maklabay and Matabalay, CVC syllables are preferred in non-final positions. The main objective to discuss reduplication is to use the framework of Optimality Theory (OT), as formulated by McCarthy and Prince (1995), Kager (1999), etc., to show that we do not need to have templatic constraints to limit the shape of the reduplicant (Gafos 1998). Our study reveals that ALIGNSEG constraints (Crowhurst 2004) are applied and we use constraint rankings to analyze the interaction of vowel epenthesis and reduplication in Atayal dialects. Concerning reduplication in Atayal dialects, we codify them as prefixing reduplication. In Atayal dialects, meanings and forms of reduplication and reduplicative patterns are our main focuses. Total reduplication, C reduplication, CC reduplication are examined in the three Atayal dialects. In Maraqwang and Maklabay, there are three main reduplicative patterns: total reduplication, C reduplication, and CC reduplication. However, these two dialects choose different strategy in word-internal codas with schwas in the nucleus for syllabification with CC reduplication. Instead of adding an epenthetic vowel as schwa, Matabalay uses the low vowel [a] to avoid consonant clusters in syllabification. C reduplication with vowel [a] epenthesis is productive in Matabalay.