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Semantically-Vacuous Variable Affix Placement in Cajamarca Quechua: Some Implications

Semantically-Vacuous Variable Affix Placement in Cajamarca Quechua: Some Implications. The 4th Newcastle Postgraduate Conference in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics 27 March 2009. Neil Myler (njm51@cam.ac.uk) Corpus Christi College Cambridge. Talk Summary. 1. Cajamarca Quechua

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Semantically-Vacuous Variable Affix Placement in Cajamarca Quechua: Some Implications

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  1. Semantically-Vacuous Variable Affix Placement in Cajamarca Quechua: Some Implications The 4th Newcastle Postgraduate Conference in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics 27 March 2009 Neil Myler (njm51@cam.ac.uk) Corpus Christi College Cambridge

  2. Talk Summary 1. Cajamarca Quechua 2. Semantically-Vacuous Variable Affix-Placement (SVAP) 3. Problems for Word-and-Paradigm Models 4. Problems for Stem-and-Paradigm Models 5. Problems for ALIGN-based affix-ordering (Anderson 2005) 6. The Solution: Distributed Morphology

  3. Cajamarca Quechua • Spoken in rural communities surrounding the northern Peruvian city of Cajamarca (Porcón, Chetilla) • Ethnologue reports that it has 30,000 speakers • High bilingualism in Spanish • Extremely low prestige; in many cases the language is no longer being passed on to children • Sources on the dialect: Coombs Lynch et al. (2003), Quesada (1976) (I have pdf) my own fieldwork (on which more later) http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=qvc

  4. Semantically-Vacuous Variable Affix-Placement -llapa : The Personal Plural Morpheme -llapa pluralises person markers on both nouns and verbs. Note that it does not pluralise the noun itself. yanasa ‘friend’ yanasa-y ‘my friend’ yanasa-yki ‘your (sg) friend’ yanasa-n ‘his/her/its friend’ yanasa-nchiq ‘our (incl.) friend’ yanasa-y-llapa ‘our (excl.) friend’ yanasa-yki-llapa ‘your (pl.) friend’ yanasa-n-llapa ‘their friend’

  5. Semantically-Vacuous Variable Affix-Placement -kuna: The Nominal Plural Morpheme yanasa ‘friend’ yanasakuna ‘friends’ -kuna uncontroversially follows the possessor person markers: mishu-y ‘my cat’ mishu-y-kuna ‘my cats’ *mishu-kuna-y (not in Cajamarca, but you do get this in some dialects)

  6. Semantically-Vacuous Variable Affix-Placement So what if –kuna and –llapa appear in the same word? Depends who you ask… Coombs Lynch et al. (2003): -llapa precedes -kuna wasi-n-llapa-kuna house-3rd-pplu-plural ‘their houses’ Quesada (1976:90): -llapa follows -kuna wasi-n-kuna-llapa house-3rd-plural-pplu ‘their houses’ Actually, many speakers I’ve asked accept both orders!

  7. Semantically-Vacuous Variable Affix-Placement Another quirk: -llapa and the postpositions Postpositions/case-markers practically always follow –llapa This is the only order reported in Quesada (1976) or Coombs-Lynch et al. (2003) wasi-n-llapa-pi house-3rd-pplu-in ‘in their house’ BUT check out this example from a folktale kimsa yanasakuna ‘the three friends’: manchay-ni-n-pi-llapa fear-NI-3rd-in-pplu ‘in their fear’

  8. Semantically-Vacuous Variable Affix-Placement Another quirk: -llapa and the postpositions continued It turns out that both orders are possible. This is true for –pi ‘in’ and a subset of the other postpositions (speakers vary on this point and I’m not yet sure what all the generalisations are) So, it seems –llapa can appear before or after –kuna. It can also appear before or after –pi, and some of the other postpositions. BUT, when we have words which contain all three affixes, the orders that turn out to be allowed are more constrained than you might think…

  9. Semantically-Vacuous Variable Affix-Placement Possible permutations with –llapa, -kuna and –pi combined a. wasi-n-llapa-kuna-pi house-3rd-pplu-plural-in “In their houses” b. wasi-n-kuna-llapa-pi c.*wasi-n-pi-kuna-llapa d.*wasi-n-pi-llapa-kuna e.*wasi-n-llapa-pi-kuna f.*wasi-n-kuna-pi-llapa

  10. Problems for Word-and-Paradigm Morphology Blevins (2003, 2006) “a rejection of the strict division between data and program, which is expressed by the familiar dichotomy between ‘entries and rules’ (Pinker 1999)” (Blevins 2003:743) Given WP’s eschewal of rule-based derivations, it relies purely on proportional analogy to account for productivity But proportional analogy over surface patterns is not constrained enough to give us the grammaticality patterns we see in SVAP!

  11. Problems for Word-and-Paradigm Morphology We observe that wasi-n-llapa-pi is a possible word, and that wasi-n-llapa-kuna is too. So why not, by analogy, *wasi-n-llapa-pi-kuna when the three affixes are combined? Or given wasi-n-pi-llapa and wasi-n-llapa-kuna, why not, in the absence of negative evidence, *wasi-n-pi-llapa-kuna? WP has no answer, and can gain no access to one, because the predictions of proportional analogy collapse at this point.

  12. Problems for Stem-and-Paradigm Morphology Anderson (1992); Stump (2001); Baerman et al. (2005) Anderson (1992) and similar approaches reject the notion of ‘affix’; affixation is just a special case of a morphological rule applying to a stem. Hence there is no formal difference between, say, marking an English plural via vowel raising (e.g. foot→feet) and marking one by suffixing ‘-s’ (e.g. hand→hands) Both are conceptualised as the result of a process applying to a stem.

  13. Problems for Stem-and-Paradigm Morphology Anderson (1992); Stump (2001); Baerman et al. (2005) Anderson (1992) relies on rule-ordering to capture affix-ordering. p.123: “the linear descriptive sequence of affixes is reflected in the rule system as the relative ordering of the corresponding rules. That is, the fact that a word has the form stem+affix1+affix2 reflects the fact that the rule attaching affix1 applied ‘before’ the rule attaching affix2” So, what do we say about SVAP? Competing grammars? Rule-inverting meta-rules?

  14. Problems for Stem-and-Paradigm Morphology Say the rules were ordered as follows: • Add –llapa • Add –kuna • Add –pi Then, perhaps we could have special optional rule-inverting meta-rules. These would optionally invert rules 1 and 2, and rules 1 and 3 (in derivations where there was no nominal plural feature, in which rule 2 would not apply). The absence of a meta-rule inverting 2 and 3 would correctly rule out all forms in which –pi precedes –kuna: *wasi-n-pi-llapa-kuna,*wasi-n-pi-kuna-llapa *wasi-n-llapa-pi-kuna

  15. Problems for Stem-and-Paradigm Morphology However, even this would not be constrained enough. If the meta-rule inverting rules (1) and (2) applied this would leave rules (1) and (3) ordered next to one another. Thus, the meta-rule inverting (1) and (3) could also apply and we could get the following rule-order: (2) Add -kuna (3) Add -pi (1) Add-llapa But this would produce the word *wasi-n-kuna-pi-llapa, which is out.

  16. Some added observations Actually, Anderson’s theory allows for the existence of ‘rule blocks’- a rule block is a set of rules (minimally consisting of one rule only), only one of which can apply in the course of a derivation. If one assumed that these rule-inverting meta rules were in the same block, then they would have to apply disjunctively. Thus rule 1 would never be able to feed rule 2, and this would get you the grammaticality patterns. There is still a potential problem for Anderson’s theory, though. Would such rule-inverting meta rules have any use in his theory other than to effect SVAP? Crucially, is there any evidence that they are used in process morphology? If not, then to invoke rule-inverting meta-rules would be to concede that affixation is in some way formally distinct from process morphology. But this is precisely what theories like Anderson’s set out to deny.

  17. Problems for an OT ALIGN-based Approach Anderson (2005), in the context of an OT account of clitic placement, outlines the following approach to affix-ordering (p.135): “Suppose a number of affixes are all constrained to be prefixes. That means that for each of them, there is a constraint to the effect that it should appear at the left edge of the word. Since these constraints are strictly ranked, however, one of them will outrank the others […] In the optimal realization of a given form, the affix corresponding to the constraint with the highest rank will actually be an initial prefix, the next highest ranked will occupy a position which violates minimally its requirement of being initial (i.e., as the second prefix), etc. Exactly similar considerations apply, mutatis mutandis, for collections of suffixes”

  18. Problems for an OT ALIGN-based Approach

  19. Problems for an OT ALIGN-based Approach Of course, the derivation overleaf will turn out ok if we just tie ALIGNR(kuna) and ALIGNR(llapa). BUT, recall that, when –kuna is not present, -llapa can also invert with –pi If we try to get this by also tying ALIGNR(llapa) with ALIGNR(pi), then effectively we end up with all three constraints tied together; we can’t avoid this if we want to capture both generalisations. But this would predict that all six logically possible orders should be grammatical when the three affixes are combined. We’ve already seen that this is wrong.

  20. Yet more added observations This is not to say that no OT approach to SVAP could be created. Since I gave this talk, Yuni Kim has drawn my attention to the work of Kevin Ryan, a PhD student from UCLA, who has a very impressive bigram constraint scheme for SVAP (his data are mainly from Tagalog, along with some other languages) which is implementable in Stochastic OT and a range of other constraint-based frameworks. I haven’t investigated this in full yet, but on first look it seems as if Ryan’s scheme should be able to get SVAP in Cajamarca.

  21. The Solution: Distributed Morphology Halle and Marantz (1993, 1994); Embick and Noyer (2001, 2006); Arregi and Nevins (2008); Embick (2007) • Narrow Syntax manipulates abstract lexical roots and bundles of formal features encoded in terminal nodes. • These nodes, which also receive the terms ‘head’ or ‘morpheme’, have no phonological content. • The phonological matrices of surface morphemes, known as ‘Vocabulary Items’, are inserted at Morphological Form before being submitted to the Phonology. • At MF, before, during and after VI-insertion, certain post-syntactic operations can eliminate, split or permute morphemes. • This means that DM is a piece-based, realisational and separationist model of morphology

  22. The Syntax of Cajamarca DPs PP DP -pi Chay NumP D ishkay AgrNumberP -kuna atun AgrPersonP -llapa nP -n Chay ishkay atun wasi-n-llapa-kuna-pi That two big house-3rd-pplu-plural-in “In those two big houses of theirs” n √wasi

  23. Morphological Lowering NumP AgrNumberP atun AgrPersonP nP n √wasi √wasi -n -n -llapa Chay ishkay atun wasi-n-llapa-kuna-pi That two big house-3rd-pplu-plural-in “In those two big houses of theirs” -kuna -llapa

  24. Preliminary Linearisation and Local Dislocation The morphology takes this output of syntax and converts it into a series of concatenation statements, like so: wasi*n*llapa*kuna*pi This will be what we get if –kuna is present. If –kuna is absent but –llapa and -pi are present, we will end up with: wasi*n*llapa*pi DM contains an operation, Local Dislocation, which exchanges the linearisation statements between two adjacent elements, leaving them adjoined to one another. I assume with Vaux (2008) that all PF operations can be marked as being optional, and that SVAP is simply an instance of optional Local Dislocation.

  25. Local Dislocation • llapa*kuna → kuna+llapa (optional) • llapa*pi → pi+llapa (optional) There is no rule inverting –kuna with –pi, so all the examples with –pi before -kuna are correctly ruled out. This includes *wasi-n-pi-llapa-kuna, since rule (1), like all instances of Local Dislocation, can only apply under strict adjacency. Since –llapa will be linearised next to –pi if –kuna is not present, we correctly predict both wasi-n-llapa-pi and wasi-n-pi-llapa to be grammatical But how do we prevent *wasi-n-kuna-pi-llapa being derived from wasi-n-kuna-llapa-pi? This is what would happen if rule (1) fed rule (2).

  26. Why can’t rule (1) feed rule (2)? Underlying Representation wasi-n-llapa-kuna-pi Rule (1) wasi-n-kuna-llapa-pi Rule (2) & Output *wasi-n-kuna-pi-llapa In fact, this form is correctly ruled out, because rule (1) creates a form kuna+llapa from which –llapa cannot escape: it is bracketed with –kuna. Hence rule (2)’s structural description is not met when rule (1) applies, and *wasi-n-kuna-pi-llapa is correctly ruled out. But rule (2) can apply if –kuna is never present in the first place, and so we correctly derive all the grammaticality patterns. UR wasi*n*llapa*kuna*pi Rule (1) wasi*n*kuna+llapa*pi Rule (2) -----cannot apply----- Output wasi-n-kuna-llapa-pi UR wasi*n*llapa*pi Rule (2) wasi*n*pi+llapa Output wasi-n-pi+llapa

  27. SUMMARY 1a. wasi-n-llapa-pi (rule 2 optionally fails to apply) b. wasi-n-pi-llapa (rule 2 optionally applies) 2 a. wasi-n-llapa-kuna-pi (rule 1 optionally fails to apply) b. wasi-n-kuna-llapa-pi (rule 1 optionally applies; rule 2 cannot apply) c.*wasi-n-pi-kuna-llapa (cannot be derived; no rule inverts –pi and –kuna) d.*wasi-n-pi-llapa-kuna (cannot be derived; rule 1 is strictly local) e.*wasi-n-llapa-pi-kuna (cannot be derived; no rule inverts –pi and –kuna) f.*wasi-n-kuna-pi-llapa (cannot be derived, rule 1 cannot feed rule 2) Thanks for Listening!

  28. List of Reference Materials • Anderson, Stephen R. (1992) A-Morphous Morphology (Cambridge: CUP) • Anderson, Stephen R. (2005) Aspects of the Theory of Clitics (Oxford: OUP) • Arregi, Karlos and Nevins, Andrew (2008) A Principled Order to Postsyntactic Operations (LingBuzz/000646: retrieved 02/11/08) • Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown and Greville Corbett (2005) The Syntax Morphology Interface: A Study of Syncretism (Cambridge: CUP) • Blevins, James P. (2003) Stems and Paradigms (Language 79.4:737-767) • Blevins, James P. (2006) Word-based Morphology (Journal of Linguistics 42:531-573) • Coombs Lynch, David, Heidi Carlson de Coombs and Blanca Ortiz Chamán (1997) Rimashun Kichwapi. Una introducción al quechua cajamarquino (Lima: Atares artes y letras) • Embick, David (2007) Linearization and Local Dislocation: Derivational Mechanics and Interactions(Linguistic Analysis 33 p.303-336) • Embick, David and Rolf Noyer (2001) Movement operations after syntax (Linguistic Inquiry 32: pp. 555-595) • Embick, David and Rolf Noyer (2006) Distributed Morphology and the Syntax-Morphology Interface (Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces, p.289-324) • Halle, Morris and Marantz, Alec (1993) Distributed Morphology, in The View From Building 20 (Cambridge MA:MIT Press pp.111-176) • Halle, Morris and Marantz, Alec (1994) Some key features of Distributed Morphology (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 21:275-288) • Quesada, Félix (1976) Gramática Quechua-Cañaris (Lima: Ministerio de Educación) • Stump, Gregory T. (2001) Inflectional Morphology: A Theory of Paradigm Structure (Cambridge: CUP) • Vaux, Bert (2008) Why the Phonological Component must be Serial and Rule-Based, in Vaux, Bert and Andrew Nevins (eds.) Rules, Constraints and Phonological Phenomena (Oxford:OUP pp.20-60)

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