Infixation without movement : an explanation of the Edge Bias Effect

A survey of 141 infixation patterns from more than 100 languages revealed that infixes invariably appear near the one of the edges of a stem or next to a stressed unit. However, more than 126 cases of these infixes (i.e. 91%) are edge-oriented. This asymmetric distribution of infixes is referred to as the Edge Bias Effect. Recent work in OT attempts to explain this edge bias in terms of the Displacement Theory (e.g., McCarthy and Prince 1993ab), which views edge-oriented infixes as underlyingly prefixes or suffixes that acquiesce to the “demands” of higher prosodic, phonotactic, or morphological considerations by surfacing inside a stem or a root. Building on recent advances in diachronic explanations of typological properties of phonological patterns (e.g., Blevins & Garrett 1998, Blevins In press etc.), this paper proposes a novel theory, called the Exogenesis Theory of Infixation, which argues that edge-oriented infixes originate from earlier prefixes or suffixes, hence the edge profile. The limited set of infixal sites is explained as the by-product of the restricted set of possible pathways that leads to the development of an infix.