Pulaar verbal extensions and phonologically driven affix order

Abstract

Pulaar, a West Atlantic language spoken across a wide area of West Africa, has a number of verb suffixes that can occur in combination, offering the linguist an opportunity to examine their relative ordering and the principles governing it. Arnott (1970:333,366) reported that in the Gombe Fula dialect, the order of affixes is largely fixed. In particular, according to Arnott, the first four suffixes to come after the verbal stem are consonantal suffixes ordered according to the formula ‘TDNR’: all of the /-t/ suffixes precede the /-d/ suffixes, which precede the /-n/ suffix, which in turn precedes the /-r/ suffixes (1970:366). As discussed in this paper, many of the verb suffixes, including several of the ‘TDNR’ suffixes that are the focus of this paper, enter into semantic scope relations with each other. Therefore, if it is true that their order is fixed, then the behaviour of these suffixes contradicts the claim of Rice (2000) that affixes are ordered according to their relative semantic scope and that templatic (fixed) affix order results only when the affixes in question do not have a scope relationship. In this paper, I present new data from a speaker of a related dialect of Pulaar showing that scope relations do play a crucial role in the ordering of these suffixes, and I then show that such an explanation is also consistent with Arnott’s (1970) data and in fact accounts for a larger set of Arnott’s examples than did his own claim of fixed ordering. I also discuss implications of this reanalysis of Pulaar affix order for Rice’s (2000) claim as well as for the morphological model advanced by McCarthy and Prince (1993a,b). The structure of the paper is as follows. First, in the remainder of section 1, I discuss Rice’s (2000) Scope Hypothesis and other proposals relating the order of affixes to their scope (Baker 1985, Bybee 1985, Condoravdi and Kiparsky 1998), and then provide background on the Pulaar language. In section 2, I present Arnott’s (1970) affix order data from Gombe Fula and discuss Arnott’s claim that the order of affixes is fixed. In section 3, I present new data from a speaker of Fuuta Tooro Pulaar and an analysis of these data in terms of scope. I then present in section 4 a reanalysis of Arnott’s (1970) Gombe Fula data similar to the one proposed for the Fuuta Tooro dialect discussed in the preceding section. In section 5, I discuss some theoretical implications of this new analysis of Pulaar affix order. section 6 concludes and summarizes the paper.