Morphotactic variation, prosodic domains and the changing structure of the Murrinhpatha verb

Abstract

Bound morphology is usually realized on lexical stems following fixed rules of sequencing, but in some highly agglutinative languages this is not the case. Morphotactic variation has previously been described in detail for Chintang and Tagalog, and more briefly noted for various other languages including Udi, Totonac and Athapaskan languages (Bickel et al., 2007; Harris, 2002; McFarland, 2009; Rice, 2000; Ryan, 2010). I here report another case of variable ordering, in Murrinhpatha, spoken in northern Australia. I argue that in this case the variable ordering of verb suffixes reflects change in progress in the morphological structure of the verb, and the dynamic nature of prosodic domains in this language. I also note that in Chintang, Udi and Murrinhpatha, morphotactic variation is associated with word-like prosodic domains occurring inside the syntactic verbal word.