Coherence in affix order

Abstract

In this article, I propose a new family of constraints on affix order, called “Coherence”, which require that index changes in morphological words are minimized. Coherence constraints complement the optimality-theoretic account of affix order for subject agreement affixes in Trommer (2003c) which relies crucially on alignment constraints, but cannot capture all attested ordering patterns. Coherence constraints have the effect that different affixes expressing features of the same syntactic head appear as close to each other as possible, but also allows to derive the restriction of verb agreement to one argument in many languages with rich inflection, in a line with Grimshaw (2001a, 2001b) and Woolford (2003) who also argue that constraints on morpheme order have crucial effects on the co-occurrence of morphemes. Finally, I show that Coherence-based analyses of the discussed data are superior to approaches in terms of Generalized Alignment (McCarthy & Prince 1993).

Keywords

• affix order
• optimality theory
• distributed morphology
• split agreement