"Templates are defined in terms of the authentic units of prosody: mora (μ), syllable (σ), foot (F), prosodic word (PrWd)." Discuss.

Some issues you might consider (though you needn’t address any of these—they’re just a few examples in case you have trouble getting started):

• does this sort of claim make sense in OT, where (i) there are no constraints on underlying representations and (ii) all constraints are supposed to be violable? (cf. McCarthy and Prince (1993), where templatic shapes are dictated by violable templatic constraints)

• following on this in a sense, Generalized Template Theory moves away from templates altogether, taking as its fundamental claim that templatic morpheme shapes arise from the interaction of independently motivated phonological constraints and that there is no need for any templatic machinery in Prosodic Morphology (McCarthy and Prince 1994b, Gafos 1998, Spaelti 1997, Urbanczyk 2006)

• how about “loose template satisfaction” cases, as discussed by e.g. Ratcliffe 1998?

• are Kager’s (1993) complex templates problematic?

• given the rich inventory of prosodic units (e.g. there are many different types of feet), is there actually any sort of templates that is ruled out by the PMH?

• are child phonology templates relevant?

• have there been any attempts by asyllabic theories to deal with putative prosodic templatic effects?

Suggested readings:

Bye, Patrik and Peter Svenonius. 2012. Non-concatenative morphology as epiphenomenon (pdf)

Downing, Laura. 2006. Prosodic Hierarchy-Based Templates. (pdf)

Gafos, Diamandis. 1998. A-templatic reduplication. (pdf)

Gouskova, Maria. 2007. The Reduplicative Template in Tonkawa. (pdf)

Kager, René. 1994. On defining complex templates. (pdf) 

McCarthy, John and Alan Prince. 1990. Foot and Word in Prosodic Morphology: The Arabic Broken Plural. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 8.2:209-283. (pdf)

McCarthy, John and Alan Prince. 1995. Prosodic Morphology. In The Handbook of Phonological Theory, John Goldsmith, ed. (pdf)

McCarthy, John J. and Prince, Alan. 1990. Prosodic morphology and templatic morphology. Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics II. 16. (pdf)

McCarthy, John. 1993. Template form in prosodic morphology. Papers from the Third Annual Formal Linguistics Society of Midamerica Conference. (pdf)

Vihman, Marilyn. 2010. Phonological templates in early words. (pdf) 

Wallace, Katherine. 2013. A Concatenative Approach to Semitic Templatic Morphology. (pdf)