Reduplication with fixed segments in Central Sarawani Balochi

The Central Sarawani dialect of Balochi (Indo-European, Iran), has a number of reduplicative patterns. One of these is an augmentative pattern that we will refer to as ‘m/p-reduplication’ and which instantiates an example of ‘morphological fixed segmentism’ in the sense of Alderete et al. (1999). The present study examines this type of reduplication in Sarawani Balochi based on Optimality Theory (OT). The linguistic corpus relies on an original fieldwork through the purposeful recording of speech gathered through interview with 10 male and female language consultants with different social backgrounds. The research findings show that this type of augmentative reduplication can be represented by ranking the following constraints: OCP, FAITH-AFFIX, MAX-BR, *ONS/N, IDENT-BR (lab), and VOP. More interestingly, however, this segment is not completely fixed: in most cases it is m, but this is not true when the stem itself contains m, it is p instead.