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Dimensions of morphological complexity in the Tira verb

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Abstract
This paper presents novel data illustrating verb inflection in the understudied language Tira (Heiban; Sudan). TAM and deixis are marked by tonal exponents, morphomic final vowels, prefixes and auxiliaries. There is complexity of exponence in the sense that there is non-isomorphism between form and function; the meaning of the verb forms is distributed across different markers. In addition, verbs fall into several inflectional classes. The organization of paradigms is analyzed by identifying principal parts, zones of interpredictability and paradigmatic layers. It is shown that the system is organized in a maximally discriminable way, without the need to identify classic morphemes to achieve unambiguous paradigmatic contrasts among the verb forms. I argue that to understand the nature of the system, we need to take both the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic dimension into account. The broader claim made in this paper is consequently that morphological theory needs to integrate both dimensions.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Tira language
    • 2.1Previous work and the Tira Language Project
    • 2.2Background on the grammar of Tira
  • 3.Syntagmatic generalizations
    • 3.1Synthetic verb forms
      • 3.1.1Imperative forms
      • 3.1.2The perfective ventive
      • 3.1.3The dependent form
      • 3.1.4The infinitive
      • 3.1.5Section summary
    • 3.2Periphrastic verb forms
    • 3.3The interplay between tonal and non-tonal exponents
      • 3.3.1Stem tone alternations in periphrastic expressions
      • 3.3.2Compositionality (or the lack thereof)
    • 3.4Section summary
  • 4.Paradigmatic generalizations
    • 4.1Inflectional classes and paradigmatic layers
    • 4.2Extension suffixes and TAMD
    • 4.3Morphomic distributions
    • 4.4Paradigmatic organization
    • 4.5Functional load and discriminability
    • 4.6Section summary
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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