Position class morphology

LING 481/581

Winter 2011

Complex affixation in English

• nation • national ‘pertaining to a/the nation’ • nationalize ‘cause to become national’ • nationalization ‘act/process of becoming

national’ • nationalizational ‘pertaining to nationalization’ • nationalizationalize ‘cause to become

nationalizational’ • Affixes sensitive to local/contiguous properties of

base

Order of adjectives

• Restrictions on sequencing

– the big blue car, *the blue big car

– the big hot cup of coffee, ?the hot big cup of coffee

– the cute little phone, ?the little cute phone

– the yucky old lettuce, the old yucky lettuce

– big leftmost? colors rightmost?

Complex affixation

• Some languages have “position class”, “templatic”, “slot-filler” morphology

– “a recurrent cross-linguistic phenomenon”

– “morphemes or morpheme classes are organized into a total linear ordering that has no apparent connection to syntactic, semantic, or even phonological representation” (Inkelas 1993)

Some language families with position class morphology

• Nimboran family (verbs)

– Nimboran

• Ural-Altaic languages (nouns, verbs)

– Uralic family

• Finnish

• Niger-Congo family (verbs)

– Kujamaat Jóola

– Kimatuumbi

Nimboran position classes

suffixes within position classes are mutually exclusive note numbers : 8 position classes

position classes sometimes but don’t always form semantic natural classes

Some Nimboran verbs

numbers above in glosses refer to person, not position classes numbers below show positions: d. root-7-8 c. root-5-7-8 b. root-2-5-7-8 a. root-2-3-5-7-8

position of morphemes not connected to semantic contribution

Nimboran root + particle root + particle (position 3) = lexical meaning

root-2-3-7-8

Finnish nominal position classes

• “nominals” = noun, adj, pronoun, numeral – nouns: auto ‘car’, katu ‘street’, nainen ‘woman’, hinta ‘price’ – adjs: iso ‘big’, kallis ‘expensive’, pitkä ‘long’, vanha ‘old’ – pronouns: minä ‘I’, he ‘they’, tämä ‘this’, se ‘it’ – numerals: yksi ‘one’, kymmenen ‘ten’, toinen ‘second’, seitsemäs ‘seventh’

• nominals exhibit “position class morphology” – positions for mutually exclusive classes of morphemes can be

identified

• root + (derivational suffixes + ) number + case + possessive + particle – ‘A Finnish nominal can have endings from all of the above four groups,

but the order in which the endings occur is fixed.’ – ‘if a word contains derivational suffixes these occur between the root

and the number ending’

Finnish number

Finnish case

Finnish possessive suffixes

Finnish enclitic particles

• “most common” are

– -kin ‘also’, -kaan~kään ‘(not...)either’, -ko~kö (interrogative), -han~hän (emphasis), -pa~pä (emphasis)

– (HS analyze these as clitics, not nominal suffixes)

Finnish verbs

• more position class morphology

• root + passive + tense/mood + person + particle

• passive: -tta~-ttä~-ta~-tä

• tense/mood:

– past: -i

– conditional: -isi

– potential (‘possible’ or ‘likely’): -ne

Language families of Africa

Austronesian

Niger-Congo family

Kujamaat Jóola verbal position classes

note prefixes + suffixes note position class numbers “How similar are the morphemes within a given position class with respect to the type of information they convey?”

Niger-Congo (family), Atlantic (family), Jóola (lg), Kujamaat Jóola

Stem = root + derivational affixes

Kimatuumbi

• Niger-Congo (family)

– Benue-Congo (family)

• Bantoid (family) – Bantu (family)

» Kimatuumbi (lg)

» Chichewa (lg)

» Swahili (lg)

...

Kimatuumbi position classes

“a disjunctive block of optional prefixes preceding already well-formed verbs; thus niteleka ‘I am cooking’ is morphologically well-formed, and the relative clause form ya-níteléká ‘which I am cooking’ derives from that unprefixed form*?+ by adding the relative clause head agreement marker.”

“the subject prefix, the only pre-root morpheme which is obligatory in inflected verbs”

“The third column contains tense and aspect prefixes.”

“The fourth column may be filled by a single optional object prefix.”

“The core of the verb in Kimatuumbi and generally in all Bantu languages is constructed around a root with any number of optional affixes (referred to as ‘extensions’), such as the causative, passive, or beneficiary, which modify the valence of the verb, or the intensive or ‘pointless’...Such a combination of root and extensions defines the derivational stem, which is the domain for application of vowel harmony...”

Most productive extensions:

“The productive extensions can be combined.”

“The combination of a derivational stem plus an appropriate ‘final vowel’ morpheme defines the inflectional stem. In verbs there are three final morphemes. The most general is –a; -e is used in the subjunctive; -ite and variants are used in the perfective.”

Position class summary

• Nimboran verbs—suffixing

• Finnish nominals, verbs—suffixing

• Kujamaat Jóola—prefixing, suffixing

• Kimatuumbi—prefixing, suffixing

• Position classes sometimes form semantic natural classes (Finnish, Kimatuumbi), not always (Nimboran, Kujamaat Jóola)