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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]
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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

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