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In:Morphology by Serial Optimization
Edited by Gereon Müller
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 289] 2025
► pp. 148–193

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The Modern Greek augment and past morphology in Harmonic Serialism

Extended exponence revised

Published online: 27 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.289.05kat
Abstract
The present paper addresses extended exponence and stem allomorphy in Modern Greek past Tense morphology and provides a new analysis of these phenomena in the framework of Inflectional Morphology in Harmonic Serialism (Müller (2020)). The paper focuses on the active past Tense augment -e (whose phonological realization depends on whether or not an antepenultimate stress pattern can be established), and the passive past augment -ik (see,e.g., Joseph and Janda (1993), Spyropoulos and Revithiadou (2009)). Past Tense is not only realized by the augment but also by a suffix that additionally encodes person and number. This is an instance of partially superfluous extended exponence in the sense of Caballero and Harris (2012): The more generic augment realizing past Tense would strictly speaking seem to be superfluous, since it cooccurs with a more specific exponent that realizes past Tense as well as φ-features. The analysis presented in this paper is based on the approach to extended exponence in (Müller (2020)), which relies on the highly ranked constraint MinSat (‘Minimize Satisfaction’). MinSat ensures that the more specific exponent is blocked at an early stage in the derivation, such that the more generic exponent can show up, and the more specific exponent can only be added later (to realize the φ-features that the augment does not cover). In the second part of the paper, the analysis is extended to stem allomorphy. It is argued that there are two different types of stem allomorphy in Modern Greek verb inflection: The morpho-syntactic feature on a stem may, or may not, satisfy the Max constraint that holds for it; if it does, affixal inflection is blocked, and if it does not, inflection is possible.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Past morphology in Modern Greek
    • 2.1Verbal morphosyntax and extended exponence
    • 2.2The morphophonological nature of the augment
  • 3.Harmonic Serialism
    • 3.1Preliminaries
    • 3.2Extended exponence via Minimize Satisfaction
  • 4.Main proposal and technical implementation
    • 4.1Passive perfective ([−act, +pfv, +pst]) forms
    • 4.2Passive imperfective ([–act, −pfv, +pst]) forms
  • 5.Disjunctive blocking: [–act, +pfv, +pst] forms
    • 5.1Disjunctive blocking in Harmonic Serialism
    • 5.2Lack of augment and overlapping extended exponence
    • 5.3Prefix vs. suffix: Resolution of alignment conflicts
    • 5.4Co-occurrence restrictions: Division into subarrays
    • 5.5Derivation of [–act, +pfv, +pst] iδri-θ-ik-a ‘I was founded’
  • 6.Allomorphic/suppletive patterns in verbal inflection
    • 6.1Allomorphy/suppletion in Harmonic Serialism
    • 6.2Allomorphy/suppletion in Modern Greek verbal morphosyntax
    • 6.3Allomorphy vs. suppletion: Setting the boundaries
      • 6.3.1Inherent/contextual vs. non-inherent/realizational features
      • 6.3.2Illustrating from MG: [+act] éstila vs. [–act] stálθika
      • 6.3.3Stem allomorphs /stil/ vs. /stal/: Derivation of [+act, +pfv, +pst] forms
    • 6.4Further application and overview of derivations
    • 6.5Interim summary
    • 6.6Derivation of [+act, +pfv, +pst] Suppletion
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Glosses
  • References
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