Abstract
The verbal morphemes in the Papuan language Nimboran are rigidly ordered; moreover, morphemes with identical ordering properties are in complementary distribution. This suggests that verbal morphemes belong to position classes, each permitting at most one member to surface. Certain morphemes belong simultaneously to more than one position class, with corresponding blocking of all morphemes in the relevant classes. A striking generalization is that position classes blocked in this joint fashion must be contiguous.
The problem is that linear order and blocking diagnose two incompatible orderings for the position classes. The solution rests in reinterpreting verbalpositions as levels in a fixed morphological hierarchy; we resolve the ordering paradox by exploiting the distinction between dominance and precedence available in a hierarchical structure.
This paper adduces new support for the theory of level-ordering and offers a formal theory of position class morphology, a well-known phenomenon which deserves attention in morphological theory. It also covers a large corpus of data — and certain phenomena — not previously discussed in the generative literature.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allen, Margaret: 1978,Morphological Investigations, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Connecticut.
Anceaux, J. C.: 1965,The Nimboran Language: Phonology and Morphology, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Deel 44, 'S-Gravenhage — Martinus-Nijhoff.
Anderson, Stephen R.: 1982, ‘Where's Morphology?’,Linguistic Inquiry 13, 571–612.
Anderson, Stephen R.: 1986, ‘Disjunctive Ordering in Inflectional Morphology’,NLLT 4, 1–32.
Anderson, Stephen R.: 1992,A-morphous Morphology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Aronoff, Mark and S. N. Sridhar: 1983, ‘Morphological Levels in English and Kannada’, in J. Richardson et al. (eds.),Papers from the Parasession on the Interplay of Phonology, Morphology and Syntax, Chicago Linguistics Society, pp. 3–16.
Ashton, E. O.: 1944,Swahili Grammar (Including Intonation), Longmans, London.
Baker, Mark: 1988,Incorporation: a Theory of Grammatical Function Changing, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Bloomfield, Leonard: 1962,The Menomini Language, Yale University Press, New Haven.
Booij, Geert: 1985, ‘Coordination Reduction in Complex Words’, in H. van der Hulst and N. Smith (eds.),Advances in Non-Linear Phonology, Foris, Dordrecht, pp. 143–160.
Booij, Geert: 1987, ‘On the Relation between Lexical and Prosodic Phonology’, in P. N. Bertinetto and M. Loporcaro (eds.),Certamen Phonologicum: Papers from the 1987 Cortona Phonology Meeting, Rosenberg and Sellier, pp. 63–75.
Booij, Geert and Jerzy Rubach: 1987, ‘Postcyclic versus Postlexical Rules in Lexical Phonology’,Linguistic Inquiry 18, 1–44.
Bybee, Joan: 1985,Morphology: a Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form, Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Cohn, Abigail: 1989, ‘Stress in Indonesian and Bracketing Paradoxes’,NLLT 7, 167–216.
Christdas, Prathima: 1988,The Phonology and Morphology of Tamil, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University.
Elson, Benjamin and Velma Pickett: 1965,An Introduction to Morphology and Syntax, Summer Institute of Linguistics, Santa Ana.
Foley, William A.: 1986,The Papuan Languages of New Guinea, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Grimes, Joseph E.: 1964,The Huichol Language, Janua Linguarum, Series Practica XI, Mouton, London.
Grimes, Joseph E.: 1983,Affix Positions and Cooccurrences: the PARADIGM Program, The Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington.
Halle, Morris and K. P. Mohanan: 1985, ‘The Segmental Phonology of Modern English’,Linguistic Inquiry 16, 57–116.
Hargus, Sharon: 1985,The Lexical Phonology of Sekani, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, published in 1988 by Garland Publishing, New York.
Hockett, Charles: 1958,A Course in Modern Linguistics, MacMillan, New York.
Inkelas, Sharon: 1989,Prosodic Constituency in the Lexicon, Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, published in 1990 by Garland Publishing, New York.
Kari, James: 1989, ‘The Athapaskan Verb Complex’,IJAL 55, 424–54.
Kimball, Geoffrey: 1991,Koasati Grammar, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
Kiparsky, Paul: 1982, ‘Lexical Morphology and Phonology’, in I. S. Yang (ed.),Linguistics in the Morning Calm, Linguistics Society of Korean, Hanshin, Seoul, pp. 3–91.
Kiparsky, Paul: 1984, ‘On the Lexical Phonology of Icelandic’, in C.-C. Elert et al. (eds.),Nordic Prosody III: Papers from a Symposium, University of Umeå, pp. 135–162.
Kiparsky, Paul: 1985, ‘Some Consequences of Lexical Phonology’,Phonology Yearbook 2, 85–138.
Lieber, Rochelle: 1980,On the Organization of the Lexicon, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, distributed by the Indiana University Linguistics Club, Bloomington.
Marantz, Alec: 1988, ‘Clitics, Morphological Merger, and the Mapping to Phonological Structure’, in Michael Hammond and Michael Noonan (eds.),Theoretical Morphology, Academic Press, San Diego, pp. 253–270.
Matthews, Peter: 1972,Inflectional Morphology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
May, Kevin and Wendy May: 1981, ‘Nimboran Phonology Revisited’,Irian 9, 9–32.
McDonough, Joyce: 1990,Topics in the Phonology and Morphology of Navajo Verbs, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
McDonough, Joyce: 1991, ‘On the Representation of Consonant Harmony in Navajo’, in Dawn Bates (ed.),Proceedings of the Tenth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Stanford Linguistics Association. pp. 319–335.
Mohanan, K. P.: 1982,Lexical Phonology, unpublished dissertation, MIT, distributed by the Indiana University Linguistics Club, Bloomington.
Mohanan, K. P.: 1986,The Theory of Lexical Phonology, Reidel, Dordrecht.
Muysken, Pieter: 1986, ‘Approaches to Affix Order’,Linguistics 24, 629–643.
Myers, Scott: 1991, ‘Persistent Rules’,Linguistic Inquiry 22, 315–344.
Nespor, Marina and Irene Vogel: 1986,Prosodic Phonology, Foris, Dordrecht.
Prince, Alan: 1983, ‘Relating to the Grid’,Linguistic Inquiry 14, 19–106.
Perlmutter, David: 1970, ‘Surface Structure Constraints in Syntax’,Linguistic Inquiry 1, 187–254.
Pesetsky, David: 1979, ‘Russian Morphology and Lexical Theory’, unpublished manuscript, MIT.
Pesetsky, David: 1985, ‘Morphology and Logical Form’,Linguistic Inquiry 16, 193–246.
Rice, Keren: 1990, ‘Predicting the Order of the Disjunct Morphemes in the Athapaskan Languages’, unpublished manuscript, University of Toronto.
Rice, Keren: 1993, ‘The Structure of the Slave (Northern Athapaskan) Verb’, in Sharon Hargus and Ellen Kaisse (eds.),Studies in Lexical Phonology, Academic Press.
Rice, Keren: 1991, ‘On Deriving Rule Domains: the Athapaskan Case’, in Dawn Bates (ed.),Proceedings of the Tenth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Stanford Linguistics Association. pp. 417–429.
Selkirk, Elisabeth: 1982,The Syntax of Words, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Siegel, Dorothy: 1974,Topics in English Morphology, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, published 1979 by Garland Publishing, New York.
Simpson, Jane and Margaret Withgott: 1986, ‘Pronominal Clitic Clusters and Templates’, in Hagit Borer (ed.),Syntax and Semantics 19: The Syntax of Pronominal Clitics, Academic Press, New York.
Speas, Margaret: 1990,Phrase Structure in Natural Language, Kluwer, Dordrecht.
Sproat, Richard: 1985,On Deriving The Lexicon, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
Sproat, Richard: 1986, ‘Malayalam Compounding: a Non-Stratum Ordered Account’,Proceedings of the Fifth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Stanford Linguistics Association, pp. 268–288.
Sproat, Richard: 1988, ‘Bracketing Paradoxes, Cliticization and Other Topics: the Mapping between Syntactic and Phonological Structure’, in M. Everaert et al. (eds.),Morphology and Modularity, Dordrecht, Foris, pp. 339–360.
Stump, Gregory: 1991, ‘On the Theoretical Status of Position Class Restrictions on Inflectional Affixes’,Yearbook of Morphology 4.
Stump, Gregory: 1992, ‘Position Classes and Morphological Theory’, unpublished manuscript, University of Kentucky (abbreviated version presented at the 1992 Linguistics Society of America Annual Meeting Philadelphia.)
Voorhoeve, Clements L.: 1975,The Languages of Irian Jaya, Pacific Linguistics Series B, no. 31, Australian National University, Research School of Pacific Studies, Canberra.
Wurm, Steven A.: 1982,Papuan Languages of Oceania, Gunter Narr, Tübingen.
Zwicky, Arnold: 1985, ‘How to Describe Inflection’,Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 11, University of California, Berkeley.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
I would like to thank Ellen Broselow, Gene Buckley, Young-mee Yu Cho, Aaron Halpern, Kathryn Henniss, Larry Hyman, Paul Kiparsky, Will Leben, Peter Sells, John Stonham, Gregory Stump, Draga Zec, and three NLLT reviewers for stimulating and encouraging discussion at various stages in the development of this paper. Various portions of this work were presented at UC Berkeley; Stanford University; UC Santa Cruz; the University of Georgia, Athens; Yale University; and the 1992 Linguistics Society of America meeting in Philadelphia. The perceptive comments of these audiences have been most helpful. Finally, I would most particularly like to acknowledge J. C. Anceaux for his remarkably compendious, insightful reference grammar of Nimboran phonology and morphology. Any faults of interpretation are strictly my own.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Inkelas, S. Nimboran position class morphology. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 11, 559–624 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00993014
Received:
Revised:
Issue date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00993014