A local analysis of an apparent non-local allomorphy in Tamil: a perspective from Rutul
Pavel Caha
August 2024 

One of the goals of a linguistic theory is to restrict the set of possible hypotheses that a child may entertain when acquiring a language. In morphology, one of the most prominent restrictions of this kind is the Adjacency Condition on allomorphy (Siegel 1978, Embick 2010, Bobaljik 2012). A particularly challenging example for this condition has been brought up in Moskal and Smith (2016). The example comes from Tamil pronominal declension, where case morphemes seem to influence the pronominal root across an intervening plural marker. This chapter argues that this long-distance interaction is only apparent, and it can be understood as the result of an interaction between two processes, namely strictly local allomorphy and syncretism. The main idea of the analysis is inspired by patterns of stem allomorphy in Rutul (Kibrik 2003).

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007493 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	to appear in: Nanosyntax and the Lexicalisation Algorithm, edited by Pavel Caha, Karen De Clercq and Guido Vanden Wyngaerd. OUP
keywords:	allomorphy, suppletion, adjacency, declension, tamil, rutul, nanosyntax, morphology
previous versions:	v3 [August 2024] v2 [August 2023] v1 [August 2023]
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