Verbal morphology in Murrinh-Patha: evidence for templates

Abstract

If questions concerning affix ordering are among the central ones in morphological theory, then languages with templatic morphology appear to provide the least interesting answer, since in these languages affix order must be simply stipulated in the form of arbitrary position classes. For this reason, much recent research into templatic morphology has attempted to show that affix order in such languages is in fact governed by underlying semantic or syntactic principles. The most fully articulated position in this respect is that of Rice (Morpheme order and semantic scope, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000), who provides a comprehensive analysis of morpheme order across the Athapaskan languages and argues that it is largely determined by universal principles of semantic (and syntactic) scope. If these principles of word formation are truly universal, we should expect to find evidence for them in all similarly ‘templatic’ systems, including the head-marking languages of Australia. In this context, I discuss the order of verbal affixes in Murrinh-Patha and show that these data cannot be adequately accounted for by syntactic or semantic accounts of affix ordering, but rather provide strong support for the existence of templatic organization in morphological systems.