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Article published In:
Lexical Issues in the Architecture of the Language Faculty
Edited by Andrea Padovan
[Evolutionary Linguistic Theory 2:1] 2020
► pp. 84–111

Why prefixes (almost) never participate in vowel harmony

| University of Tromsø
| University of Tromsø

One of the most common ways of morphological marking is affixation, morphemes are classified according to their position. In languages with affixal morphology, suffixes and prefixes are the most common types of affixes. Despite several proposals, it has been impossible to identify solid generalisations about the behaviour of prefixes, in opposition to suffixes. This article argues that the reason is that our traditional definitions of suffix and prefix are based on pre-theoretical, surface criteria that have been given up in other areas of linguistics: defining a morpheme as a prefix does not tell us anything about its grammatical nature, as that label does not take into consideration the structural configuration underlying the morpheme. Once the structural configuration is taken into account, solid generalisations begin to emerge. The article illustrates the advantages of this approach through a study of the interaction between vowel harmony and affixes.

Keywords: prefix, suffix, vowel harmony, specifier, head, spell out, root control
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: The problem with prefixes
    • 1.1The problems of the traditional definition of prefix
    • 1.2The problematic consequences of the surface definition of prefix
  • 2.How many ways to be linearised to the left? Structural configurations
  • 3.Prefixes are phonologically isolated from the base, except when they are not
  • 4.How typical vowel harmony from roots to suffixes works
  • 5.Prefixes that are isolated from vowel harmony processes
  • 6.Prefixes that undergo vowel harmony are heads
  • 7.Tunen or what happens when there is no root
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 November 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/elt.00016.fab
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