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Evidence for infixation after the first syllable: data from a Papuan language*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 February 2015
Abstract
Linguists have been attempting to define the range of locations in which infixes can occur since Ultan's pioneering work in 1975, but to date there has been no unambiguous evidence for infixation after the first syllable, despite previous (now controversial) claims of its existence by Ultan (1975) and Moravcsik (2000), as well as its predicted existence by Yu's Salient Pivot Hypothesis (‘phonological pivots must be salient at the psycholinguistic or phonetic level’) (2003, 2007). Previously examined potential examples are controversial due to restricted patterns and the acceptability of alternative analyses such as a first-vowel pivot or a foot-based pivot (Samuels 2010). In this article, I present strong evidence from fieldwork on Yeri, an endangered Torricelli language of Papua New Guinea, that imperfective and additive morphemes productively occur as infixes after the first syllable of the verb stem, and that a first-vowel or foot-based analysis cannot account for their position.
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Footnotes
My fieldwork was initially supported by the National Science Foundation under grant #0756075, with subsequent trips funded by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. I am grateful to the many Yeri speakers who contributed their time and knowledge to the Yeri documentation project, especially my principle consultants Leo Ainaris and John Sirio. I would further like to acknowledge Matthew Dryer, Jeff Good, Jeri Jaeger, Karin Michelson, several Phonology referees and the audiences of talks at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the 2012 LSA Annual Meeting in Portland for helpful comments and suggestions.
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