[Lingtyp] Free (=unexplained) morpheme ordering

Wed Dec 13 15:04:30 UTC 2023

Hi Jeremy,

I’m not sure if any of the sources below meet your requirement. From what I remember, most if not all of them point out that there are serious and identifiable restrictions on the order of the allegedly free items (and/or the process just affects a very limited number of affixes in the first place).

But I would like to highlight that the most remarkable part about the Mari/Uralic examples might be that they concern nouns. If I remember correctly, the sources below all talk about verbs. And that’s understandable because in order to have free ordering of affixes, you need at least two (types of) affixes, and nouns in so many languages do not meet that necessary criterion.

Also, there is a new edited volume on free variation in morphology and syntax that I haven’t gotten around to yet (Kopf & Weber 2023). The ToC does not suggest that there is anything immediately relevant to you in there, but I don’t know.

Lastly, I agree that it's difficult to define what an affix is. But fixed order is just one of the criteria used to determine that, as Haspelmath (2011) also discusses. If the other criteria argue for the affix status of an item, then it would be fine with me at least to call them affixes (and then pointing out the part where they diverge from the prototype). The term "mobile affix" suggested by one of the sources below is an example of that kind, I would think.

Best,

Tim

Cinque, Guglielmo. 2001. The status of “mobile” suffixes. In Bisang, Walter (ed.), Aspects of typology and universals, 13–19. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

Crysmann, Berthold & Olivier Bonami. 2016. Variable morphotactics in information-based morphology. Journal of Linguistics 52(2). 311–374.

Good, Jeff & Alan Yu. 2000. Affix-placement variation in Turkish. Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS) 25. 63–74.

Good, Jeff & Alan Yu. 2005. Morphosyntax of two Turkish subject pronominal paradigms. In Fernando Ordóñez & Lorie Heggie (eds.), Clitic and affix combinations: Theoretical perspectives, 315–341. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Kim, Yuni. 2008. Topics in the phonology and morphology of San Francisco del Mar Huave. Berkeley: University of California PhD dissertation.

Kim, Yuni. 2010. Phonological and morphological conditions on affix ordering in Huave. Morphology 20(1). 133–163.

Kopf, Kristin & Thilo Weber (eds.). 2023. Free variation in grammar: Empirical and theoretical approaches. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Mansfield, John, Sabine Stoll & Balthasar Bickel. 2020. Category clustering: A probabilistic bias in the morphology of verbal agreement marking. Language 96(2). 255–293.

Rice, Keren. 2011. Principles of affix ordering: An overview. Word Structure 4(2). 169–200.

________________________________
Von: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> im Auftrag von Vladimir Panov <panovmeister at gmail.com>
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 13. Dezember 2023 15:05
An: Jan Rijkhoff
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Betreff: Re: [Lingtyp] Free (=unexplained) morpheme ordering

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<mailto: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<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> on behalf of Jeremy Bradley <jeremy.moss.bradley at univie.ac.at<mailto:jeremy.moss.bradley at univie.ac.at>>
Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2023 12:11 PM
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto: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><mailto:jeremy.moss.bradley at univie.ac.at<mailto:jeremy.moss.bradley at univie.ac.at>>

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