Abstract
Morphological contiguity domains are pockets of natural language grammar wherein formal irregularity in one component predicts co-irregularity in a related, and often more marked, component. At the surface level, they foreclose certain allomorphic and/or distributional possibilities, producing so-called *ABA effects. Contiguity phenomena have been documented in the study of comparatives, case, pronouns, tense/aspect, inter multa alia. To this expanding list, this study adds kinship. It shall be shown that nonsingular pronouns in Lower Arrernte exemplify an apparent *ABA allomorphy-constraining distribution in which the agnate-disharmonic and non-agnate forms must co-supplete. An implementation using toy features demonstrates that the emergence of at least some *ABA patterns may be artifactual of how a paradigm is set up, and that Lower Arrernte nonsingulars do not instantiate Bobaljik (2012)'s containment hypothesis. These results are consonant with a picture of contiguity effects as a group of etiologically and derivationally heterogeneous phenomena, instead of an unambiguous diagnostic for syntactic hierarchical structure.
Highlights
This study understands contiguity to refer to the organization of grammatical subsystems of wherein discontinuous patterns of formal identity are either extremely rare or outright impossible
This study focuses on the Lower Arrernte variety ( Alenjerntarrpe, dormant as of 2011), in which nonsingular pronouns are sensitive to generation and moiety
Surface *ABA is observable in many pockets of natural language, and kinship may be more than ordinarily welcoming of these patterns, which are visible at the level of allomorphy, syncretism, and co-lexicalization
Summary
This study understands contiguity to refer to the organization of grammatical subsystems of wherein discontinuous patterns of formal identity are either extremely rare or outright impossible. [−singular, +augmented] ↔ arii / [−author, αA,αA; G ≡ 0 (mod 2)] (allomorph of plural in the environment of non-first person agnate-harmonic) f. Consider the ang-∼mpil- alternation in the second person dual forms If this is an ABB distribution, one could propose that ang- is the elsewhere form, and mpil- is the allomorph that appears in the agnate-disharmonic (set II) and non-agnate environments (set III). It bears emphasizing that this study is by no means committed to the psychological reality or theoretical utility of the generational and moietal features proposed in (8–9) They are merely toy features used here to illustrate the difficulty of combining agnate-disharmonic and non-agnate (and generation-insensitive) forms into a natural class with a shared feature that could trigger co-suppletion. If kin terms do not decompose as a result of their status as content (and not function)
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