Keywords

Affix ordering, Derivation, Typology, Morphology, Lexical processing, Russian

Abstract

Rich cross-linguistic variability in the strictness of affix ordering raises questions about how universal and language-specific factors interact to determine affix combinability patterns. While focus has been primarily on the interaction of semantic scope and language-specific formal factors, in this paper we take a first step towards a cross-linguistic, typological perspective on a different potential influencing factor: lexical processing. Based on a corpus study, we show that derivational suffix ordering is less constrained in Russian than in English. And significantly, statisticaldistributional evidence also suggests that Russian words are overall more likely to be decomposed during lexical access. This hints that the balance between wholeword storage and decomposition in a given language may partly determine freeness of derivational affix ordering, with more decomposition leading to more freedom of combination. This is consistent with an interpretation of the complexity-based ordering hypothesis (Hay 2003).

Original Publication Citation

Sims, Andrea D. and Jeff Parker. 2015. “Lexical processing and affix ordering: Cross-linguistic predictions”. Morphology 25 (2): 143-182.