Project Details
Projekt
Semantic and phonological correlates of affix order
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439622645
Affix order has been crucial for the development of both, theories of cyclicity and the extension of optimization to morphology, but raises also substantial problems for both, especially the evidence for flat arbitrary ordering in so-called "templatic" or position class morphology, and the apparent discrepancies between morphological-semantic and phonological affix properties which have led to the demise of classical Lexical Morphology. Typologically, the motivation for this project is that research on affix order has left huge empirical gaps. While there are excellent case studies on specific aspects for single languages or language families, there have been no systematic typological studies relating basic phonological properties of affixes (such as affix size and the alternations they trigger) with affix order. On the theoretical side, the shift from Lexical Phonology to Stratal OT has opened up the central theoretical question how to integrate affix ordering into an optimization approach. This challenge is especially pressing in face of a growing body of cases where phonology at least partially determines morpheme linearization.Our expectation is that taking into account phonological and semantic correlates of affix order in tandem, not only leads to principled solutions for cases of apparently arbitrary templatic affix ordering patterns, but also allows for diagnosing hierarchical relations between prefixes and suffixes which cannot be done by virtue of their linear position. The project will compile different cross-linguistic language samples for possible affix orders, both for their overall ordering systems and for specific subsystems (e.g., pronominal affixes and category-preserving derivational affixes), and systematically investigate correlations between affix ordering and semantic (e.g. specificity and scope) and phonological properties (e.g. prosodic size and phonological alternations of affixes). Our working hypothesis is that affix order and its phonological effects can be captured in a theoretically conservative and minimalist way by pursuing minimal extensions to a classical lexicalist architecture of grammar by adopting Stratal Optimality Theory for phonology and Lexical Decomposition Grammar for the incremental structure building of semantic representations. In our formal analyses, we will address four types of data which are potentially problematic for this restrictive overall framework: (1) semantically arbitrary affix orders, (2) multiple endocentric domains, (3) gradient correlates of ordering, and (4) discontinuous phonological and semantic dependencies.
DFG Programme
Research Units
Subproject of
FOR 5175:
Cyclic Optimization
