Schedule 77. StuTS

Portmanteau agreement, where an affix seems to realise phi-features of both subject and object (because its distribution depends on phi-features of both arguments), constitutes a challenge for morphological theory (e.g. Georgi 2013, Woolford 2016, Fenger 2018, Bauer to appear). I argue that so-called portmanteau agreement markers do not realise both arguments, but only one argument -- either the object or the subject -- and their distribution follows from the order of morphological operations: By f-seq and/or language-specific salience hierarchies, some arguments are realised before others not only based on case but also person and number features, and so-called portmanteau markers can only surface if they are realised late in the derivation. In Lakota (Siouan, USA), for instance, more salient arguments are realised after less salient arguments, and portmanteaux are object markers that only surface when the object is realised after a more salient subject, but not when the object is realised after a less salient subject. In Itelmen (Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Russia), on the other hand, portmanteaux are subject markers that surface when the subject is realised after a 3rd person direct object, but not when the subject is realised before a 1st or 2nd person direct or 3rd person indirect object.

The analysis is couched in the framework of Inflectional Morphology in Harmonic Serialism (Müller 2020).
References:
Bauer, Mark (to appear): Itelmen Subject-Object Agreement in Harmonic Serialism. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
Fenger, Paula (2018): ‘Multiple agreeing persons is not that special: Restrictions on person
portmanteaux’, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 24(1), 66.
Georgi, Doreen (2013): Deriving the distribution of person portmanteaux by relativized probing. In: NELS 42: Proceedings of the Forty-Second Annual Meeting of the North East
Linguistic Society. University of Massachusetts, Graduate Linguistics Students Association
Amherst, pp. 155–168.
Müller, Gereon (2020): Inflectional Morphology in Harmonic Serialism.. Equinox, Sheffield.
Starke, Michal (2001): Move Dissolves Into Merge. Phd thesis, University of Geneva.
Woolford, Ellen (2016): ‘Two types of portmanteau agreement: Syntactic and morphological’,
Optimality theoretic syntax, semantics, and pragmatics: From uni-to bidirectional optimization pp. 111–135.

Info

Day: 2025-05-15
Start time: 16:30
Duration: 00:30
Room: GWZ 2.116
Track: Morphology
Language: en

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