Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nr4z6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-01T02:03:04.307Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Evidence for infixation after the first syllable: data from a Papuan language*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2015

Jennifer Wilson
Jennifer Wilson*
Affiliation:
University at Buffalo and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
*
E-mail: jlw55@buffalo.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Linguists have been attempting to define the range of locations in which infixes can occur since Ultan's pioneering work in 1975, but to date there has been no unambiguous evidence for infixation after the first syllable, despite previous (now controversial) claims of its existence by Ultan (1975) and Moravcsik (2000), as well as its predicted existence by Yu's Salient Pivot Hypothesis (‘phonological pivots must be salient at the psycholinguistic or phonetic level’) (2003, 2007). Previously examined potential examples are controversial due to restricted patterns and the acceptability of alternative analyses such as a first-vowel pivot or a foot-based pivot (Samuels 2010). In this article, I present strong evidence from fieldwork on Yeri, an endangered Torricelli language of Papua New Guinea, that imperfective and additive morphemes productively occur as infixes after the first syllable of the verb stem, and that a first-vowel or foot-based analysis cannot account for their position.

Type
Articles
Information
Phonology , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , December 2014 , pp. 511 - 523
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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.)

Footnotes

*

My fieldwork was initially supported by the National Science Foundation under grant #0756075, with subsequent trips funded by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. I am grateful to the many Yeri speakers who contributed their time and knowledge to the Yeri documentation project, especially my principle consultants Leo Ainaris and John Sirio. I would further like to acknowledge Matthew Dryer, Jeff Good, Jeri Jaeger, Karin Michelson, several Phonology referees and the audiences of talks at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the 2012 LSA Annual Meeting in Portland for helpful comments and suggestions.

References

Benua, Laura (1997). Transderivational identity: phonological relations between words. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Bickel, Balthasar & Nichols, Johanna (2007). Inflectional morphology. In Shopen, Timothy (eds.) Language typology and syntactic description. Vol. 3: Grammatical categories and the lexicon . 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 169–240.Google Scholar
Chao, Yuen Ren (1968). A grammar of spoken Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Donohue, Mark (2009). Torricelli languages. In Brown, Keith L. & Ogilvie, Sarah (eds.) Concise encyclopedia of languages of the world. Oxford: Elsevier. 1078–1079.Google Scholar
Frampton, John (2009). Distributed reduplication. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin & Sims, Andrea D. (2002). Understanding morphology. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Helmbrecht, Johannes & Lehmann, Christian (2008). Hočank's challenge to morphological theory. In Harrison, K. David, Rood, David S. & Dwyer, Arienne (eds.) Lessons from documented endangered languages. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. 271–315.Google Scholar
Inkelas, Sharon (1990). Prosodic constituency in the lexicon. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Kimball, Geoffrey D. (1991). Koasati grammar. Lincoln, Nebr. & London: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
Laycock, D. C. (1968). Languages of the Lumi Subdistrict (West Sepik District), New Guinea. Oceanic Linguistics 7. 36–66.Google Scholar
Lewis, M. Paul, Simons, Gary F. & Fennig, Charles D. (eds.) (2014). Ethnologue: languages of the world. 17th edn. Dallas: SIL International. Available at http://www.ethnologue.com.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J. & Prince, Alan (1996). Prosodic morphology 1986. Ms, University of Massachusetts, Amherst & Brandeis University.Google Scholar
Moravcsik, Edith A. (1977). On rules of infixing. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Moravcsik, Edith A. (2000). Infixation. In Booij, Geert, Lehmann, Christian & Mugdan, Joachim (eds.) Morphology: an international handbook on inflection and word-formation. Vol. 1. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter. 545–552.Google Scholar
Paster, Mary (2006). Phonological conditions on affixation. PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Samuels, Bridget (2010). The topology of infixation and reduplication. The Linguistic Review 27. 131–176.Google Scholar
Ultan, Russell (1975). Infixes and their origins. In Seiler, Hansjakob (ed.) Linguistic workshop III: Arbeiten des Kölner Universalienprojekts 1974. Munich: Fink. 157–205.Google Scholar
Wong, Wai Yi P., Chan, Marjorie K. M. & Beckman, Mary E. (2005). An autosegmental-metrical analysis and prosodic annotation conventions for Cantonese. In Jun, Sun-Ah (ed.) Prosodic typology: the phonology of intonation and phrasing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 271–300.Google Scholar
Wurm, Stephen A. (2007). Australasia and the Pacific. In Moseley, Christopher (ed.) Encyclopedia of the world's endangered languages. London & New York: Routledge. 425–577.Google Scholar
Yu, Alan C. L. (2003). The morphology and phonology of infixation. PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Yu, Alan C. L. (2007). A natural history of infixation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar