Allomorphy in Semitic discontinuous agreement: Evidence for a modular approach to postsyntax

Prefixes and suffixes in Afroasiatic

“…The most common way of looking at the difference between agreement markers is by contrasting a "prefixal conjugation", where at least some of the agreement markers are prefixes, with a "suffixal conjugation", in which they are all suffixes. The examples from Ṣanʕani Arabic in (1)-( 2) show the second person marker as a prefix in one conjugation and as a suffix in the other, with the plural number marker a suffix in both (Watson, 1993;Hewett, 2022). This is a morphosyntactic distinction, relying on the tense and aspect features of the verb: the prefixal conjugation is the nonpast one and the suffixal conjugation the past one.…”

“…Morphotactic The third approach has been developed in recent work by Hewett (2022), who calls it "modular" or Fission-based, though we will use the term Morphotactic. The name is meant to convey the intuition that linearization results from Brill's Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics 15 (2023) 5-22 purely morphology-internal operations, which do not rely on any other part of the grammar (save for the T/Asp-based distinction between prefixal and suffixal conjugations).…”

“…As a result, person ends up to the left and number to the right: The viability of this approach is boosted by a prediction it makes for possible cases of contextual allomorphy. As Hewett (2022) explains, if morphemes (terminals) are first rearranged and only then spelled out, then the conditioning environments for allomorphy will be local in that prefixes would be conditioned by word-initial material and suffixes by word-final material. His survey of Semitic languages shows that this is the case.…”

Discontinuous first person agreement in Semitic and postsyntactic modularity

“…Brill's Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics 15 (2023) The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In section § 2, I review the key components of the system proposed in Hewett (2022) and demonstrate how that system accounts for the basic pattern of discontinuity in the second and third persons in Semitic. In section §3, I discuss first person dual discontinuities in Omani Mehri.…”

“…In this section, I give a brief overview of the analysis of discontinuous agreement in Semitic verbal paradigms put forth by Hewett (2022). I direct the interested reader to that work for a more detailed discussion, and to Kramer (This volume) for a development of that approach.…”