FEATURAL AFFIXATION

Underlying free (floating) features occur crosslinguistically. These f eatures sometime function as morphemes. Such features, like segmental morphemes, often refer to specific edges of the stem, hence they are ' featural affixes'. They get associated with the base to be prosodicall y licensed. We propose to account for the association of such features through a family of alignment constraints called 'featural alignment' which is a featural version of McCarthy & Prince's Align (MCat, MCat) . Under featural alignment, an edge is defined for a feature based on a possible licensor, which may be a root node or a mora. We argue that misalignment takes place under pressure from feature co-occurrence co nstraints. Thus a featural suffix may get realized elsewhere in the st em, surfacing as a featural infix or even as a featural prefix. This c onstraints based approach is preferred to rule-based approaches since it does not require a variety of additional assumptions needed within rule-based approaches to account for the same phenomenon. These includ e structure preservation, prespecification, extratonality and filters.