Verbal plural allomorphy in Hunzib and its implications for the cyclicity of the morphosyntax-phonology interface

Abstract

This paper investigates morphosyntactic and phonological aspects of the verbal plural in the Northeast Caucasian language Hunzib (van den Berg 1995). Verbal plural marking in Hunzib may be infixal or suffixal, and interacts in illuminating ways with morphological and phonological aspects of the verbal complex, especially with respect to establishing ordering among operations. In particular, we will see (i) that suppletive allomorphy of the verbal plural must be adjudicated at the rightmost edge of the stem, before both infixation of the infixal exponent and (morpho)phonology targeting that exponent, and (ii) that infixation of this exponent must take place after the stem of the verbal plural is fully built and has undergone a cycle of (morpho)phonology. This case study has a number of implications for modeling the morphosyntax-phonology interface, in particular, providing evidence for the precedence of exponent choice over infixation and (morpho)phonology within a cycle (Paster 2006; Bye & Svenonius 2012; Pak 2016; Kalin 2020; To appear a; Kalin & Rolle To appear; Stanton 2021, i.a.), and for bottom-up cycles in the realization of a morphosyntactic structure (Bobaljik 2000; Embick 2010; Myler 2017, i.a.).