Featural Affixes: The Morphology of Phonological Features

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Featural affixes are affixes which express morphosyntactic categories by adding phonological features to segments of a base word (cf. German Bruder brother/Brüder brothers, where plural morphology consists exclusively in vocalic fronting, i.e. the affixation of the phonological feature [-back] on the stressed vowel). Although they are among the most frequent and widespread types of morphology crosslinguistically, our theoretical understanding of featural affixes is limited by two substantial problems: (i) Systematic research on the topic has been limited almost exclusively to their phonological properties, hence we know little about featural affixes as morphological objects, and (ii) the empirical foundation of research on featural affixes is based on an extremely small sample of languages, and relies in crucial respects on empirically flawed data. This project addresses both problems by a detailed empirical and theoretical study on the morphology of featural affixes in four central areas: their linearization, cooccurrence, allomorphy, and their syncretism in the languages of the world. These areas have been the subject of intensive recent empirical and theoretical research for segmental affixes, but have received little attention with respect to featural affixes. Featural affixation as one of the most segment-like types of nonconcatenative morphology thus provides an ideal testing ground for examining the empirical validity of central assumptions of theoretical morphology in a broader empirical domain. More specifically, we pursue the following goals: (i) the creation of an extensive crosslinguistic survey of representative featural affixes to identify systematic patterns of their distribution, (ii) the extension of descriptive and theoretical categories from segmental affixation to featural affixes, (iii) the testing of hypotheses developed for segmental affixation on featural affixes, and (iv) the theoretical integration of featural affixation into a restrictive grammar formalism. Altogether, the in-depth study of featural affixation promises to substantially deepen our theoretical understanding of general principles of affixation beyond segmental affixes, but also, since featural affixes interact more massively with the phonological structure of base words than segmental affixes, the access of phonological computation to morphological structure and, more generally, the interaction of modules in the architecture of the grammar.