Verbal morphology in Murrinh-Patha: evidence for templates

Abstract

If questions concerning affix ordering are among the central ones in morphological theory, then languages with templatic morphology appear to provide the least interesting answer, since in these languages affix order must be simply stipulated in the form of arbitrary position classes. For this reason, much recent research into templatic morphology has attempted to show that affix order in such languages is in fact governed by underlying semantic or syntactic principles. The most fully articulated position in this respect is that of Rice (Morpheme order and semantic scope, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000), who provides a comprehensive analysis of morpheme order across the Athapaskan languages and argues that it is largely determined by universal principles of semantic (and syntactic) scope. If these principles of word formation are truly universal, we should expect to find evidence for them in all similarly 'templatic' systems, including the head-marking languages of Australia. In this context, I discuss the order of verbal affixes in Murrinh-Patha and show that these data cannot be adequately accounted for by syntactic or semantic accounts of affix ordering, but rather provide strong support for the existence of templatic organization in morphological systems.Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 general discussion). To these questions, however, languages with templatic morphology appear to provide the least interesting answer, since in these languages affix order must simply be stipulated in the form of arbitrary position classes. For this reason, much recent research into templatic morphology has attempted to show that affix order in such languages is not in fact templatic, but can be seen to be governed by underlying semantic or syntactic principles (e.g. Baker 1985;Bybee 1985;Rice 2000;McDonough 2000). It remains an issue of some debate whether or not such approaches can be extended to all languages with templatic morphological structures (see, among others,

The Acquisition of Polysynthetic Languages

“…Courtney and Saville-Troike (2002) suggested that morphological factors drive the acquisition of Quechua and Navajo, with roots/stems being extracted in early verb forms irrespective of their perceptual salience. This raises the interesting question of what children do when the root/stem is discontinuous in the verbal word, as in the Australian language Murrinh-Patha (Nordlinger 2010). 9 Secondly, morphological complexity does not always lead to acquisitional complexity.…”

Prosodic words in cyclic derivation: the strange case of Murrinhpatha compound verbs

“…In the stratal account of Murrinhpatha, it is shown that PWords have distinct effects in stem formation and phrasal phonology. This analysis builds on previous work on the morphological structure of the Murrinhpatha verb (Blythe 2009;Mansfield 2015Mansfield , 2016bNordlinger 2010Nordlinger , 2015Street 1987;Walsh 1976), but in the light of insights provided by prosody, proposes a revised description of the morphology. The main revision proposed is to replace a purely morphotactic "template" morphology with a mixture of prosodic constituency and morphotactics.…”

4. Word Structure in Australian languages

“…If we distinguish those bound elements which realise obligatory grammatical categories such as tense, agreement/argument indexing, case, noun class , and number, then the class of affi xes is relatively small and coherent in NPN languages: it consists just of these grammatical category-realising elements. Templates run into problems in the (unusual) cases where alternative orders of bound morphemes are possible, as in, for example, Murrinh-Patha (Nordlinger 2010), Arrernte (Henderson 1998(Henderson : 216, 2002 and Rembarrnga (McKay 19 75: 92). Some bound stems behave as "true" (phrasal) clitics (Zwicky 1985), in that they attach to words outside the last affi x.…”