Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-sd5qd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-08T13:17:51.218Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Blocking in Georgian Verb Morphology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Stanford Carmack
Stanford Carmack*
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
*
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210 [carmack.5@osu.edu]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Georgian person-number affixes reflecting subject and object agreement coexist on verb stems. As a result of limited morphotactic space, in several contexts certain markers surface while others that are equally semantically motivated do not. Inflectional blocking, relying on general linguistic principles of specificity and analogy, accounts for surface verb forms in a novel, explanatory fashion. The implication for Georgian is that instead of employing inflection produced by syntactically relevant affixation rules, its verb morphology results from morphotactic constraints, blocking of potential affix combinations, and verb stem insertion into instantiated inflectional affix frames.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 73 , Issue 2 , June 1997 , pp. 314 - 338
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Allen, Margaret R. 1978. Morphological investigations. University of Connecticut dissertation.Google Scholar
Anderson, Stephen R. 1969. West Scandinavian vowel systems and the ordering of phonological rules. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation.Google Scholar
Anderson, Stephen R. 1982. Where's morphology? Linguistic Inquiry 13. 571–62.Google Scholar
Anderson, Stephen R. 1984. On representations in morphology: Case, agreement and inversion in Georgian. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 2. 157–218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Stephen R. 1986. Disjunctive ordering in inflectional morphology. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 4. 1–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Stephen R. 1992. A-morphous morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andrews, Avery D. 1990. Unification and morphological blocking. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 8. 501–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aronoff, Mark. 1976. Word formation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Aronson, Howard. 1990. Georgian: A reading grammar. Columbus, OH: Slavica.Google Scholar
Booij, Geert. 1977. Dutch morphology. Lisse: Peter de Ridder.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Booij, Geert. 1993. Against split morphology. Yearbook of Morphology 1993. 27–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Eve, and Clark, Herbert. 1979. When nouns surface as verbs. Language 55. 767–811.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Di Sciullo, Anna-Maria, and Williams, Edwin. 1987. On the definition of word. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Esau, Helmut. 1973. Nominalization and complementation in Modern German. Amsterdam: North-Holland.Google Scholar
Halle, Morris, and Marantz, Alec. 1993. Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. The view from Building 20: Essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger, ed. by Hale, Kenneth and Keyser, Samuel Jay, 111–76. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Harris, Alice C. 1981. Georgian syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hock, Hans Henrich. 1986. Principles of historical linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holisky, Dee Ann. 1981. Aspect and Georgian medial verbs. Delmar, NY: Caravan.Google Scholar
Iverson, Gregory K., and Wheeler, Deirdre W. 1988. Blocking and the elsewhere condition. Theoretical morphology, ed. by Hammond, Michael and Noonan, Michael, 325–38. Orlando: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul. 1973. ‘Elsewhere’ in phonology. A festschrift for Morris Halle, ed. by Anderson, Stephen R. and Kiparsky, Paul, 93–106. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul. 1982. From cyclic phonology to lexical phonology. The structure of phonological representations, Part I, ed. by van, Harry Hulst, der and Smith, Norval, 131–75. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul. 1983. Word-formation and the lexicon. Proceedings of the 1982 Mid-America linguistics conference, ed. by Ingemann, Frances, 3–29. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas.Google Scholar
Marr, N., and Brière, M. 1931. La langue géorgienne. Paris: Firmin-Didot.Google Scholar
Morin, Yves-Charles. 1988. Disjunctive ordering and French morphology. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6. 271–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nash-Haran, Léa. 1992. La catégorie agr et l'accord en géorgien. Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes 21. 65–79.Google Scholar
Paul, Hermann. 1896. Über die Aufgaben der Wortbildungslehre. Sitzungsberichte der königlich bayerische, Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosphisch-philoligische und historische Classe 692–713.Google Scholar
Rainer, Franz. 1988. Towards a theory of blocking: The case of Italian and German quality nouns. Yearbook of Morphology 1988. 155–85.Google Scholar
Šanije, Ak'ak'i. 1973. Kartuli gramat'ik'is sapujvlebi [Fundamentals of Georgian grammar]. 2nd ed. Tbilisi: Tbilisis Universit'et'is Gamomcemloba.Google Scholar
Spencer, Andrew. 1991. Morphological theory: An introduction to word structure in generative grammar. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Toman, Jindrich. 1980. Wortsyntax. University of Köln dissertation.Google Scholar
Tschenkéli, Kita. 1958. Einführung in die georgische Sprache. 2 vols. Zurich: Amirani.Google Scholar
Vamling, Karina. 1989. Complementation in Georgian. Lund: Lund University Press.Google Scholar
van Marle, Jaap. 1985. On the paradigmatic dimension of morphological creativity. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Vogt, Hans. 1971. Grammaire de la langue géorgienne. Oslo: Universitets-forlaget.Google Scholar
Wheeler, Max W. 1993. On the hierarchy of naturalness principles in inflectional morphology. Journal of Linguistics 29. 95–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wurzel, Wolfgang U. 1987. System-dependent morphological naturalness in inflection. Leitmotifs in Natural Morphology, ed. by Dressler, Wolfgang U., 59–96. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Wurzel, Wolfgang U. 1989. Inflectional morphology and naturalness. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Zwanenburg, Wiecher. 1981. Le principe du blockage dans la morphologie dérivationelle. Linguistics in the Netherlands, ed. by Daalder, Saskia and Gerritsen, Marinel, 65–72. Amsterdam: North-Holland.Google Scholar
Zwicky, Arnold. 1987. Phonological and morphological rule interactions in highly modular grammars. Eastern States Conference on Linguistics 3. 523–32.Google Scholar