School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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Inflectional predictability and prosodic morphology in Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara

Wilmoth, S ; Mansfield, J (SPRINGER, 2021-11)

Lexically stipulated suppletive allomorphy, such as that found in inflection class systems, makes wordforms unpredictable because any one of several exponents may be used to express some morphosyntactic property set. However, recent research shows that apparently complex inflectional paradigms can be organised in such a way that knowing one inflected form of a lexeme greatly reduces the uncertainty of other forms (e.g. Ackerman and Malouf 2013). Further typological work is required to investigate the ways in which inflectional interpredictability is achieved, and what aspects of wordforms may be informative. In this paper we present a case study of interpredictability in verbal inflection in Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (Pama-Nyungan; Australia). We show that a combination of suffix allomorphy, prosodically conditioned stem augmentation, and the prosodic structure of verbal roots all conspire to achieve a paradigm that is totally interpredictable: hearing one inflected verb enables a speaker to produce with certainty any other form of that verb. We also provide a detailed description of metrical structure in the language, clarifying previous analyses.