Lingít (Tlingit) portmanteau allomorphy requires Fusion1

• Main Author: Seth Cable
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Athabascan; Lingít; tlingit; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.585.1564; http://people.umass.edu/scable/papers/Tlingit-Portmanteau-Fusion.pdf

perfective aspect and subject agreement are often “combined” with surrounding prefixes into a single portmanteau morph. I present an analysis of this system whose unique advantages rest upon its use of Fusion operations. The conceptual advantages of the analysis demonstrate that if one looks beyond the “phonological appearance ” of the alternations in question, and considers the morpho-syntactic features being combined, one can begin to see generalizations and connections that are otherwise hidden. 1 Portmanteau allomorphy in the Lingít verbal prefix string Lingít is a Na-Dene language spoken in Alaska and British Columbia.2 Like its distant relatives in the Athabascan family, verbal inflectional and derivational morphology is almost exclusively prefixal, and comparatively complex rules of contextual allomorphy can serve to drastically alter the underlying phonological form of the verbal prefixes. Certain of these alternations are given a constraint-based analysis in Cable (2004). Other alternations, however, appear to defy serious phonological analysis; this is especially the case with the aspectual and subject agreement morphemes. For certain combinations of subject agreement and aspect features, the phonological realizations of those features on the Lingít verb is a form that is not derivable from the usual underlying forms of the prefixes and the general phonology of the verbal prefix string. The targeted patterns of allomorphy may be described by the rewrite rule system in (1). The appendix to this paper collects a number of textually attested forms illustrating most of these alternations.