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<p>Dear all,</p>
<p>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>
</p>
<p>a.<br>
<i>joltaš-em-βlak-lan</i><br>
friend-1SG-PL-DAT<br>
‘to my friends’<br>
(Px-Nx-Cx)<br>
<br>
b.<br>
<i>pire-βlak-et-lan</i><br>
wolf-PL-2SG-DAT<br>
‘to your wolves’<br>
(Nx-Px-Cx)<br>
<br>
c.<br>
<i>joč́a-βlak-lan-že</i><br>
child-PL-DAT-3SG<br>
‘to his/her/their.SG children’<br>
(Nx-Cx-Px)<br>
</p>
<p>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 class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://doi.org/10.7557/12.6373">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.</p>
<p>My question: does anybody else know of examples of languages with
<span class="ILfuVd" lang="en"><span class="hgKElc">concatenative
</span></span>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>
</p>
<p>Best,<br>
Jeremy<br>
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Jeremy Bradley, Ph.D.
University of Vienna
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.mari-language.com">http://www.mari-language.com</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:jeremy.moss.bradley@univie.ac.at">jeremy.moss.bradley@univie.ac.at</a>
Office address:
Institut EVSL
Abteilung Finno-Ugristik
Universität Wien
Campus AAKH, Hof 7-2
Spitalgasse 2-4
1090 Wien
AUSTRIA
Mobile: +43-664-99-31-788
Skype: jeremy.moss.bradley</pre>
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