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In:Morphology by Serial Optimization
Edited by Gereon Müller
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 289] 2025
► pp. 270–305

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Exponent movement in Irarutu possession marking

Published online: 27 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.289.08mul
Abstract
In the Austronesian language Irarutu (spoken in North-West New Guinea), alienable possession is expressed by a person/number prefix, whereas inalienable possession is realized by (what may at first sight look like) a circumfix, i.e., there is a co-occurrence of the prefix used for alienable possession and an additional person suffix (Voorhoeve (1989), van den Berg & Matsumara (2008), Jackson (2014)). Interestingly, there is a subclass of inalienable kinship terms where the exponent that is otherwise realized as a suffix emerges as an inner prefix. This phenomenon lends itself to an analysis in terms of morphological movement in an approach to inflectional morphology based on Harmonic Serialism.
The argument for morphological movement consists of three steps. First, it is shown that prefix/suffix status cannot be an inherent property of possessive exponents but follows from interacting alignment constraints. Second, closer inspection reveals that the exponents in question are not in fact specified for possession marking; this in turn implies that they are in a partially superfluous extended exponence relation, where the more general exponent enters the structure before the more specific one. And third, this means that the more general exponent has to have undergone morphological movement from a suffix to a prefix position in surface representations where both exponents are prefixes.
Article outline
  • 1.Alienable and inalienable possession in Irarutu
  • 2.Prefix/suffix ambiguity
  • 3.Partially superfluous extended exponence
  • 4.Inflectional morphology in Harmonic Serialism
  • 5.Extended exponence
  • 6.Morphological movement
  • 7.Disjunctive blocking
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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