Andrej A. Kibrik (aakibrik@gmail)

1. Andrej A. Kibrik(aakibrik@gmail.com) Qualitative morphological complexity: The case of Athabaskan Growth and Decline of Morphological Complexity April 27, 2012, Leipzig

2. Athabaskan • About 40 languages in western North America

3. Most examples: Upper Kuskokwim (Central Alaska)

4. Welcome to Nikolai

5. Crash introduction • Quantitative complexity • Long words • Many categories • Qualitative complexity • Almost exclusive prefixation (unusual) • Derivation and inflection are intermingled • One grammeme is conveyed by several devices • Complex morphophonemics: s+l > j • ...............................

6. “Standard average Athabaskan” verb template • Between 10 and 20 positions/zones • Lexical and derivational • Mixed/equivocal • Inflectional

7. Qualitative complexity in Athabaskan • Entangled morphological structure • Many-to-many correspondences between meanings and forms • Extreme anti-agglutination • Case studies: • Vacillating perfective • Travesty inceptive • Chameleonic root

8. 1. Vacillating perfective: *N- > e-

9. gh-..-trak ‘cried’ PF shows up in the presence of a pre-root pronoun PF “displaced” by the pre-root pronoun PF present in the absence of a pre-root pronoun

10. gh-..-di-yish ‘breathed’ PF suddenly shows up

11. Vacillating perfective: conclusions • Intricate behaviour of the perfective morpheme • Absent in the z-perfective conjugation • Absent in the low transitivity verbs • These two features can possibly be explained by semantic transitivity in the vein of Hopper and Thompson (1980), but not fully • Displaced by some personal pronouns, but not all • Can be explained by formal structure, but not fully • Homophonous to other, entirely different, morphemes in the same part of the verb word • Low predictability on the basis of either semantic or formal factors

12. 2. Travesty inceptive • Conjunct derivational prefixes: “qualifiers” (Kari 1989) • Surprisingly monotonous in structure: mostly n- and d- • Some other qualifiers, but incomparably rarer

13. Koyukon (Jette and Jones 2000)

14. Navajo (Young, Morgan, and Midgette 1992: 851-853)

15. Inceptive • ghi-s-mał ‘I am swimming’ Prog-1Sg-swim[Prog] • ta-zi-s-manh ‘I am starting to swim’ Inc-Conjug-1Sg-swim[Pf] • ti-ghi-s-mał ‘I will swim’ Inc-Prog-1Sg-swim[Prog] • di-ti-ni-ghi-ł-dey’ ‘I will write’ dQual-Inc-nQual-Prog-[1Sg-]TI-write

16. Navajo inceptive • d-é-saał ‘I am going to dash’ Inc-1Sg-TI:fly[Pf] • (Young and Morgan 1987: 309) • di-ni-sh-dááh ‘I am getting stuck’ dQual-nQual-1Sg-TI:walk[Impf] • di-dí-née-sh-dááł ‘I will get stuck’ dQual-Inc-nQual:Prog-1Sg-TI:walk[Prog] • (Young and Morgan 1987: 323-325)

17. Travesty inceptive: conclusions • Already very high polysemy of qualifiers in general Athabaskan • Significant increase in polysemy in Navajo: the highly productive and semantically transparent inceptive prefix merges, violating the principles of historical phonology, with the vast range of other, etymologically unrelated, prefixes • Impossible to define the qualifier positions in semantic/functional terms • These are positions for various conjunct derivational prefixes • In an extreme, we face the “d-position” and the “n-position” • It IS complexity: opacity of form, entropy

18. 3. Chameleonic root

19. Suffixation treatment (Axelrod)

20. If you think this is not chameleonic enough • One Koyukon verb root (Jette and Jones 2000: 17)

21. Chameleonic root: conclusions • Diachronically: • suffixation, dependent on “mode” and lexical aspect • Synchronically: • suffixes can only be partly discerned • extreme allomorphy of verb root • allomorphy is irregular • Many-to-many correspondences between meanings and forms • One meaning (e.g. imperfective) is conveyed by many suffixes • One suffix corresponds to several mode-aspect combinations

22. What all this is good for? • Awe and pity • General theory of morphological complexity • Typology of morphological complexity

23. Theory: Kinds of simplicity vs. complexity • Quantitative simplicity vs. complexity • Number of relevant phenomena (e.g. Nichols 2009) • Qualitative simplicity vs. complexity • Transparency vs. entaglement of structure • Roughly, one-to-one vs. many-to-many correspondence between meanings and forms • Structural order vs. entropy • Agglutination vs. non-agglutination

24. Qualitative complexity resulting from diachronic processes intricate distribution  

25. Typology of languages:disposition to complexity • Various languages have various degrees of tolerance to complexity • Some languages do not wait too long to restructure and simplify structure, when too much complexity accrues • But some other languages seem to “like” complexity, and even increase it in the domains that are already very complex • This may be a typological parameter

26. Athabaskan • In terms of quantitative complexity, Athabaskan is not the champion (Nichols 2009) • In terms of qualitative complexity, I suspect that Athabaskan is a candidate for championship • This may be related to peculiar social/cultural factors • Note the Athabaskan resistance even to lexical borrowing • Athabaskan cultures tend to bring language contact to a minimum • This kind of linguistic communities can be expected to accumulate complexity