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In:Morphology by Serial Optimization
Edited by Gereon Müller
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 289] 2025
► pp. 83–115

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Itelmen subject-object agreement in Harmonic Serialism

Published online: 27 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.289.03bau
Abstract
In Itelmen, subject agreement surfaces as a prefix and object agreement in the form of a suffix. When it comes to third person direct object agreement, these particular suffixes additionally encode the features of the subject and are hence called (person) portmanteaus. Such portmanteaus only surface in the suffix slot and never in the prefix slot, yielding a subject-object asymmetry. Bobaljik (2000) derives this asymmetry by cyclic morphological realization, with Itelmen portmanteaus emerging as object suffixes with contextual subject features. This assumption turns out to be problematic from the perspective of partially superfluous extended exponence (Caballero and Harris 2012). The present reanalysis is based on the pre-syntactic morphological theory of Inflectional Morphology in Harmonic Serialism (IMHS; Müller 2020). Assuming the order of object>subject, the derivation firstly selects the most specific compatible object exponent; portmanteaus are also available for selection and are only selected within this sequence. When the derivation continues to the subject exponent, all possible portmanteaus have already been considered for selection. This prevents a portmanteau from taking the place of a subject exponent.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Overview
    • 1.2Background
    • 1.3Itelmen agreement
  • 2.Analysis in Distributed Morphology (Bobaljik 2000)
  • 3.Implementation in Harmonic Serialism
    • 3.1Arrays and subarrays
    • 3.2Harmonic serialist requirements
    • 3.3Harmonic serialist derivation
  • 4.Implementation of Itelmen data
    • 4.1Paradigms and exponents
    • 4.2Transitive paradigm derivation
    • 4.3The Intransitive paradigm
    • 4.4Class markers
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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