[Lingtyp] Free (=unexplained) morpheme ordering

[Vladimir Panov]

Dear Jeremy & others,

Let me remind you of an important issue which has to do with the question
of this thread.

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.,
https://www.eva.mpg.de/fileadmin/content_files/staff/haspelmt/pdf/WordSegmentation.pdf)
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.

I am also attaching my own paper which discusses very similar issues
regarding so-called "particles" whose main argument is completely parallel.

I know many don't share this view but I consider it my duty to raise this
argument again and again.

Best,
Vladimir



ср, 13 дек. 2023 г. в 13:49, Jan Rijkhoff <linjr at cc.au.dk>:

> 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>
>
> Office address:
> Institut EVSL
> Abteilung Finno-Ugristik
> Universität Wien
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>
> Mobile: +43-664-99-31-788
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