Heidi Harley

University of Arizona

The morphophonology and morphosyntax of Hiaki bound stem forms

Abstract: The overall goal of this talk is to address the question of the source of locality constraints on word-internal processes of various kinds, closely examining the complex verb forms of the Uto-Aztecan language Hiaki. Hiaki verbs often have two forms, a bound one to which (roughly speaking) derivational morphology is attached and a 'free' one to which (roughly speaking) inflectional morphology is attached. In the past I have suggested that this is due to a word-internal phase boundary. In this talk, I suggest instead that it’s because these forms, seemingly single words, are not uniformly formed by head-movement, but rather by post-syntactic merger. I think that that is the implications of the fact that we have recently discovered a) that 'free' forms' terminal vowels are likely instantiations of Voice+Mood morphology b) that many stem forms are related to their corresponding 'free' forms by virtue of a crucially word-final consonant fortition rule c) that many stem forms are related to their corresponding 'free' forms by the application of word-enlarging echo vowel. This suggests a parallel with Barragan (2005)'s analysis of Cupeño, according to which complex words with an apparent internal boundary are formed by head-movement applying to two sub-sequences of the syntactic projection and the resulting complex heads cliticizing or undergoing 'merger-under-adjacency'. If this is right, then there aren’t head-internal 'cyclic' nodes (phase boundaries), at least for Hiaki; rather, such phenomena are symptomatic of the application of different types word-assembly mechanisms.