Murrinhpatha number conflation: The limits of feature markedness and *ABA
Elango Kumaran
August 2023 

This paper discusses patterns of number syncretism in Murrinhpatha (Southern Daly, Australia) verbal inflection. The language exhibits all logically possible singular/ dual/plural conflation patterns. The data challenge Smith et al.’s (2019) proposal that a feature markedness difference between dual and plural yields a *ABA restriction in each language. I suggest that morphology is not restricted by feature markedness; true *ABA restrictions only arise in cases of structural containment.

Section 2 introduces previous work on *ABA restrictions, focusing on some of Smith et al.’s (2019) work on number. Section 3 discusses the Murrinhpatha data. The inflectional system includes 38 conjugation classes, allowing for a great diversity of morphological patterns within the same language. All possible conflation patterns are attested (and I argue that these are cases of genuine syncretism), but some patterns are much more frequent than others, mirroring crosslinguistic data. Notably, neither of the nonsingular values (dual, plural) seems to be more marked than the other.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007476 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of CLS 59, to appear. (Amended version: corrected an error in section 3.3.)
keywords:	number, markedness, agreement, morphology
previous versions:	v1 [August 2023]
Downloaded:	338 times

 

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