[Lingtyp] Free (=unexplained) morpheme ordering

[Jan Rijkhoff]

Dear Jeremy,

On this topic, see for example also the attached article by Bickel et al. from 2007.

Best,
Jan R

J. Rijkhoff - Associate Professor (emeritus), Linguistics
URL: http://pure.au.dk/portal/en/linjr@cc.au.dk

________________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Jeremy Bradley <jeremy.moss.bradley at univie.ac.at>
Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2023 12:11 PM
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: [Lingtyp] Free (=unexplained) morpheme ordering

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<mailto:jeremy.moss.bradley at univie.ac.at>

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