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
position of morphemes not
numbers below show positions:
connected to semantic
d. root-7-8
contribution
c. root-5-7-8
b. root-2-5-7-8
a. root-2-3-5-7-8
Nimboran root + particle
root + particle (position 3) = lexical meaning
root-2-3-7-8
Finnish nominal position classes
• “nominals” = noun, adj, pronoun, numeral
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–
–
–
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
NigerCongo
family
Kujamaat Jóola verbal position classes
Niger-Congo (family), Atlantic (family), Jóola (lg), Kujamaat Jóola
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?”
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
ni ̧teleka ‘I am cooking’ is morphologically well-formed, and the relative clause form yaní ̧teléká ‘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; -i ̧te and variants are used in the perfective.”
Position class summary
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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)