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Two paths to polysynthesis

Evidence from West Circassian nominalizations

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Abstract

West Circassian displays prominent polysynthetic morphology both in the verbal and nominal domains and both syntactic categories are subject to the same morphological ordering constraints. I argue that despite these similarities, nominal and verbal wordforms in West Circassian are in fact constructed via two distinct word formation processes: while the verbal root and any accompanying functional morphology are pronounced as a single phonological word by virtue of forming a single complex syntactic head via head displacement, the nominal head and its modifiers are pronounced as a single word due to rules of syntax-to-prosody mapping. Such a division of labor provides an account for why only nouns, and not verbs, exhibit productive noun incorporation in the language: West Circassian noun incorporation is prosodic, rather than syntactic. The evidence for the existence of these two avenues of word formation comes from a systematic violation of morpheme ordering observed in verbal nominalizations. In terms of broader theoretical impact, the proposed analysis provides insight into what factors shape a polysynthetic language: while it is tempting to reduce polysynthetic morphology to either simple head displacement or just a consequence of mapping complex syntactic structure to a single phonological word without any head displacement, the West Circassian data show that neither of these mechanisms can be dispensed with.

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Notes

  1. The examples are glossed in accordance with the Leipzig conventions, with the following additions: dir – directive; dyn – present tense on dynamic verbs; hbl – habilitive; mod – modal future; pr – possessor; re – refactive; sml – simulative. Following recent literature on West Circassian, I use the following non-standard symbols for the transcriptions:

  2. For a recent description of the templatic nature of West Circassian morphology and possible violations in the nominal domain see Lander (2017); for a general overview of the West Circassian morphology see Arkadiev et al. (2009).

  3. The latter form only appears if there are no overt prefixes preceding it; the former allomorph appears everywhere else (Arkadiev et al. 2009: 45–46).

  4. See Gorbunova (2009) on alienable vs. inalienable possession in West Circassian.

  5. I follow previous work on West Circassian (see e.g. Arkadiev et al. 2009; Lander 2017) in uniting lexical roots and TAM-related suffixes as subparts of the stem because there are phonological processes that are sensitive to the stem boundaries (to be discussed in the following section).

  6. Adjectives and ordinal numerals formed with the relational adjective suffix -re may optionally appear as separate phonological words (Lander 2017: 83); I assume that this has to do with the possibility of these forms to head a separate DP, although the details of this account remain outside the scope of this paper.

  7. See Lander (2012a) for additional syntactic and semantic evidence for the lexical modifiers forming a single word with the head root in a nominal complex.

  8. The vowel within the causative prefix varies in accordance with the /e/∼/a/ alternation discussed in Subsect. 2.2.

  9. Note, however, that nothing in the analysis relies on this assumption.

  10. Note that the word-final vowel in the derivational suffix -λe in (33b) undergoes optional deletion in accordance with a regular phonological rule; this rule counterbleeds the /e/∼/a/ alternation (Arkadiev et al. 2009: 26–27).

  11. See Arkadiev and Testelets (2015) on the correlation between the presence of overt case marking and a DP layer in Circassian languages.

  12. See also Gordon and Applebaum (2010), who account for a similar phenomenon in the related language East Circassian (Kabardian) as a mismatch between syntactic and prosodic structure.

  13. Compton and Pittman (2010) follow Chomsky (2001, 2008) in assuming that the spellout domain of a phase is the complement of the phase head. Here I depart from this assumption and follow Fox and Pesetsky (2005), Richards (2016) in treating the full phase, including the phase head and its specifiers, as the spellout domain.

  14. Alternatively, the constraint in (37) may in fact be a family of constraints: Match CP and Match DP, with the latter constraint ranked higher than Match Word, and the former—lower. Either account is equally compatible with the proposed analysis. Note that this analysis can likewise be restated in terms of categorical rules, rather than ranked constraints; these rules would then have the following form: (i) a DP phase must be mapped to a phonological word; (ii) a CP phase must be mapped to a phonological phrase.

  15. Building on acoustic evidence for recursive prosodic structures, the ban on recursion as it was presented within the Strict Layering Hypothesis has been reevaluated in subsequent work as a violable optimality constraint; see Selkirk (1996, 2011), Truckenbrodt (1999), Ito and Mester (2013), Elfner (2015), a.o. I adapt this approach here as well, and additionally leave open the possibility that there may be several constraints on recursion based on the particular prosodic unit in question.

  16. While not overtly implemented, a similar constraint ranking must be assumed to account for the mapping of CP phases to verbal forms under Compton and Pittman’s (2010) analysis: there must be a constraint that ensures that phonological words corresponding to argument DPs are not recursively embedded within the phonological word that the full CP phase is mapped to. Prosodic restructuring that results in a mismatch between syntactic structure and the phonological output is cross-linguistically well-attested, see e.g. Clemens (2014), Sabbagh (2014), Bennett et al. (2016), Clemens and Coon (2018).

  17. The syntax of nominalizations and the vP-internal structure in (41) are discussed in Sect. 4.

  18. The suffix displays a number of additional uses, all of which involve a finite predicate. While Serdobolskaya (2009) argues that the various uses of this suffix can be conflated into a single semantic profile, in this paper I distinguish the nominalizing use of this suffix from other uses—in the latter case this suffix is glossed as mod (modal future), following Lander and Bagirokova (2015).

  19. Embedded clauses marked with the factive prefix zer(e)- are generally analyzed as a type of relative clause; see Gerasimov and Lander (2008), Caponigro and Polinsky (2011: 103–111), Lander (2012b: 296–309) on the semantic and morphosyntactic properties of the factive prefix.

  20. The forms of the dative prefix and third person indirect object marker vary throughout these examples due to regular phonological alternations: the dative prefix je- undergoes vowel deletion and rotatization before the glide /j/ in (54a), and the indirect object agreement marker a- undergoes metathesis with the dative marker je- (54b), (54c), rendering ja-; for details on alternations involving the glide /j/ see Arkadiev and Testelets (2009: 140–145).

  21. The final vowel of both affixes is often omitted for phonological reasons; the allomorph zere- is used to mark the reciprocal relation between an ergative and an absolutive participant (Arkadiev et al. 2009: 63–64; Letuchiy 2010: 339–344).

  22. For details on the syntactic and semantic properties of the resultative passive construction see Arkadiev (2016).

  23. For a detailed description of depictive secondary predication in West Circassian see Vydrin (2008).

  24. Note that the case-licensed applicative DP as in (54b), (54c) is not subject to this ordering constraint and may surface both before or after the structurally higher external argument. The reason for this is that this type of scrambling to a position above the possessor in Spec,PossP is only possible for full DPs, and not caseless NPs. Since a West Circassian nominal may only license at most one possessor, only one of the arguments of a nominalized bivalent predicate may be expressed as a full DP, and the other is necessarily an incorporated NP which remains in situ in its base position.

  25. This observation about compounding in English dates as far back as Bloomfield (1933) (see also Marchand 1969, a.o.) and has received much attention in the literature; see Selkirk (1982: 28–29); Lieber (1983); Ackema and Neeleman (2004: 54–66); Harley (2009: 140–142), inter alia.

  26. See also Pensalfini (2004) for an evacuation-based account of polysynthetic word formation.

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks the speakers of West Circassian for sharing their language, especially Svetlana K. Alishaeva, Saida Gisheva, Susana K. Khatkova, and Zarema Meretukova. I am grateful to Jason Merchant, Neil Myler, Boris Harizanov, Maziar Toosavardani, the audiences at the Morphology and Syntax Workshop at the University of Chicago and LSA 2018 for comments and discussion, Greg Kobele for comments on previous versions of this work, and especially Karlos Arregi. The trip to the village Neshukay in July 2014 was organized by the Higher School of Economics and the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. I am grateful to the participants of the 2014 expedition, especially Yury Lander. I would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers and the editor Daniel Harbour for very useful comments and suggestions. This project was partially funded by the Graduate Research Aid Initiative in Linguistics from the University of Chicago and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Dissertation Research Grant. All mistakes and shortcomings are my own.

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This paper is based on data collected in the Republic of Adygea (Russia) in July 2014 and September-October 2017, as well as data from the online Corpus of West Circassian designed by Timofey Arkhangelskiy, Irina Bagirokova and Yury Lander (abbreviated here as WCC). The field data comes from two dialects: the Bzhedug dialect, spoken in the village Neshukay (Teuchezhsky district), and the Temirgoy dialect, spoken in the Khatazhukay rural settlement (Shovgenovsky district). The following abbreviations are used to mark the dialect of an example: Bzhedug – Bz; Temirgoy – Tg. Unless otherwise indicated, all data from cited sources is from the Temirgoy dialect, which serves as the basis for the literary standard.

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Ershova, K. Two paths to polysynthesis. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 38, 425–475 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-019-09455-w

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