Parsing morphology : the theory and its implications

Most morphological theories assume that a morphological change affects the meaning of a lexical item or indicates a specific relationship of the lexical item to some other lexical items in the utterance. Moreover, for item and arrangement morphology, most theories assume that a given morphological change may have only one lexical category in its scope. Most theories do not envision the existence of an inflectional marker that has different lexical categories in its scope and does not change the meaning of a lexical category. Moreover, no theories of morphology envision inflectional markers that have in their scope other grammatical morphemes. The present study proposes the existence of a morphological marking that differs significantly from the types of marking recognized so far. The main characteristics of this morphological marking are as follows: (1) It is not associated with any specific lexical category and can occur with all lexical categories in the language; (2) the marking may have in its scope derivational and inflectional morphemes; and (3) the marking is not associated with any specific function relating to the specific grammatical or semantic domain. The specific function of this marking is extrapolated each time from the preceding and ensuing material. The * The work on Wandala has been supported over many years by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, Jane and Charles Butcher Foundation, and University of Colorado. The most recent work has been supported by the National Science Foundation Grant Nr. 0439940. I am most grateful to Wandala speakers with whom I worked the most: Seini Aji Alhaji, Oumaté Mahamat, and especially Ramadan Abba. The help of other speakers whose involvement in the project was much shorter is also gratefully acknowledged. Various elements of this study were presented at the University of Nantes, at the Conference on Irregularity in Morphology (University of Bremen), at the University of Warsaw, and at the 38 North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics. I would like to thank participants for questions and comments, which helped in sharpening the hypotheses and the argumentation. I am grateful to Amina Mettouchi for her comments during our common work on related projects and for her comments on an earlier version of this paper. Many thanks to Erin Shay for reading several earlier versions of this study and for her comments. I am grateful to Scott Delancey, Joan Bybee, and Shlomo Izre’el for their comments and penetrating questions. None of the people whose queries were so helpful is in any way responsible for the errors of facts or interpretation in this study.