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<p>Dear all,</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>As Vladimir and Tim say, I noted in 2011 that the various
criteria for affixhood do not always converge, and this has been
confirmed by more recent research (e.g. van Gijn & Zúñiga
2014; Bickel & Zúñiga 2017; Zingler 2022; Muysken 2023).</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>But I think that the conclusion from this cannot be either (i)
that we stop using the term "affix" (though I originally said
this, like Vladimir in his post), or (ii) that we accept that "it
is difficult to define affixes" (as in Tim's post).</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>I now think that "affix" is a comparative concept term that we
expect to understand in the same way across languages, so there
should be a definition that applies to all languages. I provided
such a definition in my 2021 paper (see also the definition of
"word" in the 2023 paper).</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>These definitions will not make everyone happy, but I wrote these
papers to emphasize that it is not an empirical question what the
terms "affix" or "word" mean. Whether flags, adpossessive indexes
and plural markers may occur in a free order in languages is an
empirical question (Jeremy's original question), and for this
question, one doesn't need to define "affixes". (However, if one
adopts my 2021 definition of "affix", one can go on to ask to what
extent affixes are mobile, because fixed order is not part of the
definition.)</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>Martin</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><font size="2"><b>References</b></font></p>
<p><font size="2"><br>
</font></p>
<div class="csl-bib-body"
style="line-height: 1.35; margin-left: 2em; text-indent:-2em;">
<div class="csl-entry"><font size="2">Haspelmath, Martin. 2021.
Bound forms, welded forms, and affixes: Basic concepts for
morphological comparison. <i>Voprosy Jazykoznanija</i>
2021(1). 7–28. (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://zenodo.org/record/4628279">https://zenodo.org/record/4628279</a>)</font></div>
<font size="2"><span class="Z3988"
title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fzotero.org%3A2&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.31857%2F0373-658X.2021.1.7-28&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Bound%20forms%2C%20welded%20forms%2C%20and%20affixes%3A%20%20Basic%20concepts%20for%20morphological%20comparison&rft.jtitle=Voprosy%20Jazykoznanija&rft.volume=2021&rft.issue=1&rft.aufirst=Martin&rft.aulast=Haspelmath&rft.au=Martin%20Haspelmath&rft.date=2021&rft.pages=7-28&rft.spage=7&rft.epage=28"></span></font>
</div>
<p><font size="2"><br>
</font></p>
<div class="csl-bib-body"
style="line-height: 1.35; margin-left: 2em; text-indent:-2em;">
<div class="csl-entry"><font size="2">Haspelmath, Martin. 2023.
Defining the word. <i>WORD</i> 69(3). 283–297. <a
href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.2023.2237272"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.2023.2237272</a>.</font></div>
<span class="Z3988"
title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fzotero.org%3A2&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1080%2F00437956.2023.2237272&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Defining%20the%20word&rft.jtitle=WORD&rft.volume=69&rft.issue=3&rft.aufirst=Martin&rft.aulast=Haspelmath&rft.au=Martin%20Haspelmath&rft.date=2023&rft.pages=283-297&rft.spage=283&rft.epage=297&rft.issn=0043-7956"></span>
</div>
<p></p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 13.12.23 16:04, Zingler, Tim wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:dc9c2ab9aa914c22be7a1651f33b8238@uibk.ac.at">
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dir="ltr">
<p>Hi Jeremy,</p>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I’m not sure if any of the sources below meet your
requirement. From what I remember, most if not all of them
point out that there are serious and identifiable restrictions
on the order of the allegedly free items (and/or the process
just affects a very limited number of affixes in the first
place). </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>But I would like to highlight that the most remarkable part
about the Mari/Uralic examples might be that they concern
nouns. If I remember correctly, the sources below all talk
about verbs. And that’s understandable because in order to
have free ordering of affixes, you need at least two (types
of) affixes, and nouns in so many languages do not meet that
necessary criterion.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Also, there is a new edited volume on free variation in
morphology and syntax that I haven’t gotten around to yet
(Kopf & Weber 2023). The ToC does not suggest that there
is anything immediately relevant to you in there, but I don’t
know.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Lastly, <span
style="font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif, Helvetica, EmojiFont, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", NotoColorEmoji, "Segoe UI Symbol", "Android Emoji", EmojiSymbols; font-size: 16px;">I
agree that it's difficult to define what an affix is. But
fixed order is just one of the criteria used to determine
that, as Haspelmath (2011) also discusses. If the other
criteria argue for the affix status of an item, then it
would be fine with me at least to call them affixes (and
then pointing out the part where they diverge from the
prototype). The term "mobile affix" suggested by one of the
sources below is</span><span
style="font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif, Helvetica, EmojiFont, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", NotoColorEmoji, "Segoe UI Symbol", "Android Emoji", EmojiSymbols; font-size: 16px;"> an
example of that kind</span><span
style="font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif, Helvetica, EmojiFont, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", NotoColorEmoji, "Segoe UI Symbol", "Android Emoji", EmojiSymbols; font-size: 16px;">,
I would think.</span></div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Best,</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Tim</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Cinque, Guglielmo. 2001. The status of “mobile” suffixes.
In Bisang, Walter (ed.), Aspects of typology and universals,
13–19. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Crysmann, Berthold & Olivier Bonami. 2016. Variable
morphotactics in information-based morphology. Journal of
Linguistics 52(2). 311–374.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Good, Jeff & Alan Yu. 2000. Affix-placement variation
in Turkish. Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS) 25. 63–74.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Good, Jeff & Alan Yu. 2005. Morphosyntax of two Turkish
subject pronominal paradigms. In Fernando Ordóñez & Lorie
Heggie (eds.), Clitic and affix combinations: Theoretical
perspectives, 315–341. Amsterdam: Benjamins.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Kim, Yuni. 2008. Topics in the phonology and morphology of
San Francisco del Mar Huave. Berkeley: University of
California PhD dissertation.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Kim, Yuni. 2010. Phonological and morphological conditions
on affix ordering in Huave. Morphology 20(1). 133–163.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Kopf, Kristin & Thilo Weber (eds.). 2023. Free
variation in grammar: Empirical and theoretical approaches.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Mansfield, John, Sabine Stoll & Balthasar Bickel. 2020.
Category clustering: A probabilistic bias in the morphology of
verbal agreement marking. Language 96(2). 255–293.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Rice, Keren. 2011. Principles of affix ordering: An
overview. Word Structure 4(2). 169–200.</div>
<p><br>
</p>
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
<hr tabindex="-1" style="display:inline-block; width:98%">
<div id="divRplyFwdMsg" dir="ltr"><font style="font-size:11pt"
face="Calibri, sans-serif" color="#000000"><b>Von:</b>
Lingtyp <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org"><lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org></a>
im Auftrag von Vladimir Panov
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:panovmeister@gmail.com"><panovmeister@gmail.com></a><br>
<b>Gesendet:</b> Mittwoch, 13. Dezember 2023 15:05<br>
<b>An:</b> Jan Rijkhoff<br>
<b>Cc:</b> <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a><br>
<b>Betreff:</b> Re: [Lingtyp] Free (=unexplained) morpheme
ordering</font>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div>
<div dir="ltr">Dear Jeremy & others,
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Let me remind you of an important issue which has to
do with the question of this thread.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>When we want to say that there are languages with
affixes which exhibit a degree of ordering freedom there
is a tacit assumption that we know what it means to be
an affix. However, as Martin Haspelmath (2011 etc.,
<a
href="https://www.eva.mpg.de/fileadmin/content_files/staff/haspelmt/pdf/WordSegmentation.pdf"
id="LPlnk22936" previewremoved="true"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">
https://www.eva.mpg.de/fileadmin/content_files/staff/haspelmt/pdf/WordSegmentation.pdf</a>)
has argued, we atually don't and our ideas about
"words", "affixes" and "clitics" are very much inflenced
by spelling conventions of modern European languages
(and it doesn't solve the problem). So why not take a
bottom-up approach and describe the morphemes in
questions of Mari in their own terms establishing their
relevant morphosyntactic and phonological properties
instead of labeling them "affixes"? Otherwise, we should
acknowledge that "affixes" exist independently of
particular languages as a natural kind out there in a
metaphysical space and are somehow "instantiated" in
Mari in a wrong (free-ordered) way. But if we do without
"affixes" (which are normally thought of as appearing in
a fixed order) then there is nothing surprising in their
free orderedness any longer. The formulation "languages
with concatenative morphology" suffers from the same
kind of circularity - as if we knew where morphology
ends and syntax begins.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I am also attaching my own paper which discusses very
similar issues regarding so-called "particles" whose
main argument is completely parallel.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I know many don't share this view but I consider it
my duty to raise this argument again and again.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Best,</div>
<div>Vladimir</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
</div>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">ср, 13 дек. 2023 г. в
13:49, Jan Rijkhoff <<a href="mailto:linjr@cc.au.dk"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">linjr@cc.au.dk</a>>:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote"
style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204); padding-left:1ex">
Dear Jeremy,<br>
<br>
On this topic, see for example also the attached article
by Bickel et al. from 2007.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Jan R<br>
<br>
J. Rijkhoff - Associate Professor (emeritus),
Linguistics<br>
URL: <a
href="http://pure.au.dk/portal/en/linjr@cc.au.dk"
rel="noreferrer" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">
http://pure.au.dk/portal/en/linjr@cc.au.dk</a><br>
<br>
________________________________________<br>
From: Lingtyp <<a
href="mailto:lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>>
on behalf of Jeremy Bradley <<a
href="mailto:jeremy.moss.bradley@univie.ac.at"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">jeremy.moss.bradley@univie.ac.at</a>><br>
Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2023 12:11 PM<br>
To: <a href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a><br>
Subject: [Lingtyp] Free (=unexplained) morpheme ordering<br>
<br>
Dear all,<br>
<br>
It's a fairly well-described feature of Mari (Uralic)
that there is a lot of variation in the ordering of case
suffixes (Cx), possessive suffixes (Px), and number
suffixes (Nx), with multiple arrangements oftentimes
being permissible and the factors determining this
distribution being completely opaque, e.g. (examples
from corpus):<br>
<br>
a.<br>
joltaš-em-βlak-lan<br>
friend-1SG-PL-DAT<br>
‘to my friends’<br>
(Px-Nx-Cx)<br>
<br>
b.<br>
pire-βlak-et-lan<br>
wolf-PL-2SG-DAT<br>
‘to your wolves’<br>
(Nx-Px-Cx)<br>
<br>
c.<br>
joč́a-βlak-lan-že<br>
child-PL-DAT-3SG<br>
‘to his/her/their.SG children’<br>
(Nx-Cx-Px)<br>
<br>
Jorma Luutonen gave a detailed, quantitatively based
overview of this phenomenon in his 1997 dissertation
(The Variation of Morpheme Order in Mari Declension); a
student of mine recently revisited the question with the
now existing corpus infrastructures (edited by me and
published at <a href="https://doi.org/10.7557/12.6373"
rel="noreferrer" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">
https://doi.org/10.7557/12.6373</a>) ... and in both
cases, the surveys didn't really succeed to find the
actual factors determining this distribution outside of
a few shards of explanations (e.g. the "later" the Px,
the less likely it is that it expresses possession) here
and there.<br>
<br>
My question: does anybody else know of examples of
languages with concatenative morphology in which there
are degrees of freedom like this, with the factors
determining the arrangement being (for now) completely
non-transparent? We keep saying in Uralic studies that
this makes Mari unusual (plenty of other Uralic
languages have variation in the arrangement of suffixes,
but I don't know of any others having these degrees of
freedom), but I am curious how much this holds on a
larger stage.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Jeremy<br>
<br>
--<br>
Jeremy Bradley, Ph.D.<br>
University of Vienna<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.mari-language.com" rel="noreferrer"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">http://www.mari-language.com</a><br>
<a href="mailto:jeremy.moss.bradley@univie.ac.at"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">jeremy.moss.bradley@univie.ac.at</a><mailto:<a
href="mailto:jeremy.moss.bradley@univie.ac.at"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">jeremy.moss.bradley@univie.ac.at</a>><br>
<br>
Office address:<br>
Institut EVSL<br>
Abteilung Finno-Ugristik<br>
Universität Wien<br>
Campus AAKH, Hof 7-2<br>
Spitalgasse 2-4<br>
1090 Wien<br>
AUSTRIA<br>
<br>
Mobile: +43-664-99-31-788<br>
Skype: jeremy.moss.bradley<br>
_______________________________________________<br>
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</blockquote>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<br>
<fieldset class="moz-mime-attachment-header"></fieldset>
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</blockquote>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/">https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/</a></pre>
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