Templates from syntax to morphology: affix ordering in Qafar

Abstract

The functional head suggests that verbs acquire their inflectional properties by moving from one head position to the next in the syntactic derivation. A problem arises as affixes’ ordering is not sensitive to syntactic properties, as it is the case in Qafar. This Cushitic language exhibits two verbal classes depending on whether verbs can have prefixes. I argue that the hierarchical structure of template corresponds to the syntactic structure. Phonological constraints on templates formation activate adequate syntactic operations. If we assume that templatic domains lie at the interface between syntax and phonology, we account for some issues of affix ordering, that involve no syntactic property.