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Evidence for infixation after the first syllable: data from a Papuanlanguage*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2015

Jennifer Wilson
Jennifer Wilson*
Affiliation:
University at Buffalo and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
*
E-mail: jlw55@buffalo.edu.
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Abstract

Linguists have been attempting to define the range of locations in which infixescan occur since Ultan's pioneering work in 1975, but to date therehas been no unambiguous evidence for infixation after the first syllable,despite previous (now controversial) claims of its existence by Ultan (1975) andMoravcsik (2000), as well as its predicted existence by Yu's SalientPivot Hypothesis (‘phonological pivots must be salient at thepsycholinguistic or phonetic level’) (2003, 2007). Previouslyexamined potential examples are controversial due to restricted patterns and theacceptability of alternative analyses such as a first-vowel pivot or afoot-based pivot (Samuels 2010). In this article, I present strong evidence fromfieldwork on Yeri, an endangered Torricelli language of Papua New Guinea, thatimperfective and additive morphemes productively occur as infixes after thefirst syllable of the verb stem, and that a first-vowel or foot-based analysiscannot account for their position.

Type
Articles
Information
Phonology , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , December 2014 , pp. 511 - 523
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

My fieldwork was initially supported by the National Science Foundationunder grant #0756075, with subsequent trips funded by the MaxPlanck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. I am grateful to themany Yeri speakers who contributed their time and knowledge to the Yeridocumentation project, especially my principle consultants Leo Ainarisand John Sirio. I would further like to acknowledge Matthew Dryer, JeffGood, Jeri Jaeger, Karin Michelson, several Phonologyreferees and the audiences of talks at the Max Planck Institute forEvolutionary Anthropology and the 2012 LSA Annual Meeting in Portlandfor helpful comments and suggestions.

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