A novel argument for cyclicity from the (non-)transparency of infixes at morpheme junctures: Bottoms up!
Laura Kalin
April 2024 

Infixation is characterized by the intrusion of one morphological element inside of another, and so infixes are by their very nature disruptors of locality, which will be the focus of this paper. Canonical examples of infixes involve an intramorphemic position for the infix, in particular, with the infix appearing inside of a root, e.g., kakri ‘act of crying’ (root kakri, nominalizer -ni-; Leti, Blevins 1999). But, since infixes are generally positioned relative to a phonological “pivot” (see, e.g., Yu 2007), and since infixes should in principle be able to—and indeed do!—combine with multimorphemic stems, infixes can sometimes, incidentally, appear inside of an affix or even at a morpheme juncture, intermorphemically. In this paper, I ask: When an infix (incidentally) appears between two morphemes in its stem, does the infix disrupt relations at/across that morpheme juncture that we otherwise would expect to be strictly local? To answer this question, I investigate the cross-context transparency vs. non-transparency of 7 infixes (from 6 languages; 5 language families) that can appear at a morpheme juncture. I find that these infixes never interrupt semantic, morphosyntactic, allomorphic, or morphophonological interactions/relationships in their stems, but do disrupt (late/surface) phonological interactions/relationships in their stems. These findings shed significant light on the derivational timing (or representational levels) of different grammatical relationships/interactions and constitute a strong novel argument for the bottom-up cyclicity of both exponence (choice and insertion of an exponent) and morphophonology.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008111 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Princeton University
keywords:	morphology, infixation, locality, cyclicity, allomorphy, phonology, syntax, morphology, syntax, phonology
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