Affix Suspension Day

[Frans Plank]

Dear colleagues,

first, note that Suspended Affixation Day has a new name:  a victim to
metathesis, rampant in this sort of weather, it has become Affix Suspension
Day.  Fortuitously, apart from forestalling the acronym SAD, as a result it
will in future be easier to distinguish between Affix Suspension Day,
Clitic Suspension Day, and Real Word Suspension Day.  For a start, however,
we'll have just one day for celebrations, which also ought to give us an
opportunity to sort out how all these suspensions differ, if indeed they do.

At any rate, the Day in question continues to be Saturday, 24 June 2006.
(Not 2007, Sergio!  Terribly sorry about the clash with the Achtelfinale
match in Leipzig, David.  I've worked it all out already:  it will be
Argentina [first of group C, ahead of The Netherlands] against Mexico
[second of group D, behind Portugal], not the most exciting of fixtures,
with the outcome too obvious.)

Come to think of it, given the enthusiastic response to our original call,
we're thinking of extending Suspension Day so as to include an Affix
Suspension Eve, beginning on Friday, 23 June, early afternoon, if this is
viable for everybody involved.  Please drop us a line to that effect.

Also, those of you who are sure they can make it to ASD, please let us know
how we can help you with accommodation arrangements (days of arrival and
departure;  hotel category, five stars or less).  We're exploring
possibilities of at least subsidising the accommodation costs of guests
from afar.

By the way, as you expect, Konstanz is on Lake Constance, which is locally
known, somewhat confusingly, as Bodensee.  It's a small town, but you'll be
able to home in on it on Google Earth;  the university is the yellow speck
by the water.  It can be reached by boat, train, car (neither is really
recommended), or plane (the closest airports are Zuerich in Switzerland and
Friedrichshafen, across Lake Constance, in Germany).

As of today, we have received these statements of intent, in alphabetical
order, and we do hope that none will have to be suspended:

Marcel Erdal (Frankfurt),
on coming to an amicable agreement about suspended affixation in Turkish

Alice Gaby (Nijmegen),
on where you *don't* find suspended affixation in Kuuk Thaayorre, where
they otherwise do it a lot

Casper de Groot (Amsterdam),
on the adjectival phrase marker -i in Hungarian and its supension behaviour

Olya Gurevich (Berkeley),
on why Georgian, once the group-inflecting prototype, doesn't like to suspend

Baris Kabak (Konstanz),
on when you can and cannot suspend in Turkish, and why

Istvan Kenesei (Budapest),
on the affix-to-word continuum, and how suspension bears on it

Frans Plank (Konstanz),
on what you'd expect as a morphological typologist, and the surprises
you're in for

Amanda Pounder (Calgary),
on what she likes to call morphological brachylogy, with special reference
to Freuhneuhochdeutsch

Andrew Spencer & Ana Luis (Colchester),
on, for instance, why is it that some articles and prepositions in Romance
languages are so difficult to 'suspend'?

Bernhard Waelchli (Konstanz),
on tight and loose coordination, scope in coordination, and
phonological-syntactic non-isomorphism



We hasten to repeat that unlike Ascension Day Affix Suspension Day will be
an informal affair.  Few people will present polished papers (I won't --
FP);  but if this is what they'll eventually aim at producing, we could
consider seeking to publish them collectively.

If interested in giving a paper (length and polish within reason:  do send
a title, preferably with an abstract, by next week), or just to listen in
and join in the discussion, let us know asap, and we'll be in touch.

For the benefit of those still considering joining in, we're repeating the
call below, with some slight amendments and a few addenda.



Frans Plank (frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de)
Baržs Kabak (baris.kabak at uni-konstanz.de)
Bernhard Wälchli (bernhard.waelchli at uni-konstanz.de)

Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft & Sonderforschungsbereich 471,
Universität Konstanz
Konstanz, Germany



*************************************


AFFIX SUSPENSION DAY

Konstanz
Saturday, 24 June 2006
(possibly beginning Friday, 23 June, afternoon, that is, on Affix
Suspension Eve)


THE REMIT


Affix Suspension Day is not to be confused with Ascension Day, which is on
Thursday, 25 May, while the former will only be held on Saturday, 24 June.
We'd like to invite phonologists, morphologists, syntacticians, and
semanticists (and why not pragmaticists too) to join us in paying homage to
the marvels of suspended affixation on that day.

Suspended affixation is what you see, or indeed don't see, in this Turkish
sentence:

Tebrik ve teSekkür-ler-im-i sunaržm.
congratulation and thank-PL-1SG-ACC I.offer
'I offer my congratulations and thanks'

In a syntactic construction (coordination) where two members (nouns) can
potentially be affixed for the same inflectional categories (number, person
and number of possessor, case), one (the first) isn't.  Though it could be
(tebrik-ler-im-i ...), with no great semantic or pragmatic difference in
this particular case.  As everybody knows, however, it does make a
difference whether you suspend or don't in cases like this (they did make a
few films separately):

Laurel('s) and Hardy's films

The term "suspended affixation" was probably coined by G. L. Lewis in his
Turkish Grammar (1967), and has subsequently found particular favour in
Turkic linguistics (see further
http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/kabak/papers/Kabak2007saff.pdf).
However, the phenomenon as such had been much discussed in morphological
typology, most notably, in the Humboldt/Steinthal tradition, by Franz
Nikolaus Finck in his Die Haupttypen des Sprachbaus (1910), where it is
subsumed under the notion of "group inflection".  (What's nowadays called
"phrase marking", as opposed to "word marking".  See the introduction to
Double Case, if you find the original sources too heavy-going.)

At any rate, suspended affixation is not something limited to inflection;
on certain conditions, derivational affixes can be suspended, too:

This stuff is neither eat- nor drink-able.

And with affixes being not altogether different from clitics (depending on
one's theoretical stance, to some extent), one would like to know how affix
suspension relates to clitic suspension, or the suspension of any sort of
function word, prosodically weak or strong.  But then, the suspendability
or otherwise of function words is a hornets' nest.  Even the relevant basic
facts about well known languages are often unclear.  Just ask yourselves
whether you can or can't you suspend in such examples:

A man and (a) child came.
Ein Mann und (ein) Kind kamen.
N'Mann und (n')Kind kamen.

On Affix Suspension Day we propose to discuss questions such as the
following, and whichever others you feel bear on the issue:

*  What is suspended affixation in the first place?
The non-expression of an affix under form-identity and meaning-identity
(perhaps with form-identity sometimes licensing meaning-nonidentity)?  If
so, is this sort of (German) example an instance of it?

mit mein-em Mann(-e) selig[-en]
mit mein-em selig-en Mann(-e)
'with my late husband'
(every word in the NP agreeing in gender, number, case, but with the
adjective unsuffixed when postnominal)

*  What are the precise mechanisms of suspension?
Is such non-expression (akin to) ellipsis?  Can suspension (of the relevant
kind) also be effectuated by casual/fast-speech phonology?  Cf., once more
from German (sorry):

Sie komm-en und geh-en
they come-3PL.IND.PRES and go-3PL.IND.PRES
casually pronounced:
Sie komm(=ng) gehn

*  Which languages permit (or favour) and which prohibit (or disfavour)
suspended affixation?
(surely not all permit it all the time ...)

*  Is suspended affixation, wherever observed, characteristic of speech or
only of writing?

*  What kinds of syntactic constructions admit suspended affixation in the
relevant languages?
(coordination, tight/loose apposition, subordinative constructions, ...)

*  What does suspended affixation tell us about the nature of constructions?
(relevant differences for morphological words, phonological words/clitic
groups, syntactic phrases?)

*  Which kinds of morphological milieus are conducive to affix suspension?
(agglutination, with affixes separatist, invariant, loosely-bound, not
flexion, with affixes cumulative, variant, tightly-bound?)

*  What kinds of semantic and pragmatic constraints curb suspended
affixation in circumstances where it would be possible on morphosyntactic
and phonological grounds?
(semantic unity, scope, frequency, ...)

*  What kinds of prosodic constraints curb suspended affixation?
(phonological wordhood of bases, prosodic weight of affixes, ...)

*  What notions of "word" and "phrase" are relevant for accounting for
suspended affixation?
(phonological, morphological, syntactic ...)

*  What is the relation of suspended affixation to phrase marking?
(to patterns such as these:  N-case;  N-ADJ-case, with case not an
agreement category, unlike in German mein Mann selig, above)

*  ...