Sumayya Racy

535 Assignment 9

Halle, Impoverishment & Fission

Due: Tues, Feb. 17

1.    What affix is inserted in the additional slot created by Fission in the Plural Genitive of the Latin 5th Declension?

/s/

2.    Why does Halle say at the end of section 4 that "the linear order of the inserted morphemes is not determined by the order of insertion of Vocabulary items"? For which forms does his analysis force him to say this?

In PlG we get “r[s]-um”, while in PlD, we get “bu-s”. In the former, the /s/ is inserted before the stem, and in the latter, it is inserted after.

3.    What additional linear-ordering convention does Halle introduce to deal with the Semitic conjugations?

Imperfect forms may only include one prefix. The preceding was indeed what I was looking for, but it might not be obviously a 'linear-ordering convention'. Another possible answer might be that he assumes that vocabulary items can be specified as prefixes or suffixes in Halle's analysis of the Semitic conjugations.

4.   What phenomenon in Walbiri does Halle take to be the final justification for Fission as a real phenomenon? That is, what phenomenon can a Fission-based analysis take care of that a less fine-graned analysis cannot? (i.e a proposal that analysed his proposed Fissioned affixes as just phonolgical substrings of a larger affix)

When a subject clitic which is composed of a person marker and a number marker comes before the object clitics /tju/ (“I”) or /ŋku/ (“you”), the number marker follows the object clitic, rather than preceding it as it would normally do. This can be accounted for by a methasis rule which switches the Number morepheme with /tju/ or /ŋku/. If fission had not taken place to split up the subject clitic, such metathesis would not has been possible.