Journal article
Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha: expanding the typology of non-canonical morphotactics
Rachel Nordlinger, John Mansfield
Linguistics Vanguard | Walter de Gruyter GmbH | Published : 2021
Abstract
Principles of morphotactics are a major source of morphological diversity amongst the world’s languages, and it is well-known that languages exhibit many different types of deviation from a canonical ideal in which there is a unique and consistent mapping between function and form. In this paper we present data from Murrinhpatha (non-Pama-Nyungan, northern Australia) that demonstrates a type of non-canonical morphotactics so far unattested in the literature, one which we call positional dependency. This type is unusual in that the non-canonical pattern is driven by morphological form rather than by morphosyntactic function. In this case the realisation of one morph is dependent on the positi..
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Grants
Awarded by Australian Research Council through the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language
Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
We have presented aspects of this data at the New Fields for Morphology Workshop in Melbourne (2015), the Morphological Eye: Surrey Morphology Group 25th Anniversary workshop (2017) and the Niches in Morphology Workshop at the SLE conference in Zurich (2017). We thank the audiences of these workshops for their useful feedback and suggestions, and especially Matthew Baerman, Matt Carroll, Andy Spencer and Greg Stump. We also thank two reviewers for suggestions that led to improvements in the paper. We are grateful to the Australian Research Council for funding our fieldwork on Murrinhpatha over many years, especially through the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (Project ID: CE140100041) and John Mansfield's ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (Project ID: DE180100872).