[Lingtyp] Free (=unexplained) morpheme ordering

[Jeremy Bradley]

Dear all,

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):

a.
/joltaš-em-βlak-lan/
friend-1SG-PL-DAT
‘to my friends’
(Px-Nx-Cx)

b.
/pire-βlak-et-lan/
wolf-PL-2SG-DAT
‘to your wolves’
(Nx-Px-Cx)

c.
/joč́a-βlak-lan-že/
child-PL-DAT-3SG
‘to his/her/their.SG children’
(Nx-Cx-Px)

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 
https://doi.org/10.7557/12.6373) ... 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.

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.

Best,
Jeremy

-- 
Jeremy Bradley, Ph.D.
University of Vienna

http://www.mari-language.com
jeremy.moss.bradley at univie.ac.at

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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20231213/421bd55c/attachment.htm>