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In:Morphology by Serial Optimization
Edited by Gereon Müller
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 289] 2025
► pp. 52–82

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Portmanteaux as an epiphenomenon

The case of Potawatomi

Published online: 27 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.289.02and
Abstract
In Potawatomi transitive animate (TA) verb forms, the first person plural object marker /nan/ occurs in the context of a third person subject but not in the context of a second person subject (see Hockett (1948), Stump (2001)). At first sight, this suggests that /nan/ must be a portmanteau agreement marker, i.e., lexically specified for φ-features of both arguments. However, portmanteau agreement gives rise to problems in some existing approaches to morphological exponence. In this paper I show that in a derivational presyntactic merge-based morphological theory like Müller’s (2020) Inflectional Morphology in Harmonic Serialism, one can make do without this assumption by deriving the distribution of /nan/ via the timing of exponent Merge operations relative to the end of the derivation. Building on Andermann (2022, 2023), I assume that in Potawatomi, exponents realising a third person argument are always merged before exponents realising a speech act participant (SAP, i.e., first or second person), and if both arguments are SAP, exponents realising the object are merged before exponents realising the subject. I furthermore assume that the 1pl object marker /nan/ can only be merged if no structure-building feature is unchecked, i.e., if the subject has already been realised, which is the case in the context of a 3rd person subject but not in the case of a 2nd person subject. Thus, the distribution of /nan/ is an epiphenomenon of the order of morphological operations. Moreover, by parametrising the order of merge operations, the analysis can be extended to portmanteau agreement in Lakota.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The phenomenon
    • 1.2State of the art
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Transitive animate verbs in Potawatomi
    • 2.2Andermann (2022, 2023) on inverse marking
  • 3.Deriving /nan/ by the order of merge operations
    • 3.1The portmanteau must be merged late
    • 3.2Sample derivation: k-wapm-Uy-mUn (‘you see us’)
    • 3.3Summary and extension to preterite contexts
    • 3.4Outlook: Lakota portmanteaux
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (32)
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