Accounting for the position of verbal agreement morphology with psycholinguistic and diachronic explanatory factors

This article attempts a more complete explanation of the position of verbal agreement affixes which, unlike other inflections, lack a correlation with word order and are prefixes relatively more frequently. An analysis of the factors that determine the position of affixes during morphologization reveals that agreement inflections originate in relatively more mobile sources (unstressed pronouns) and are associated to polymorphemic hosts. This, in combination with a proposed psycholinguistic principle, which during morphologization, prevents fusion of grammatical markers to complex sequences of inflections (for which crosslinguistic statistical evidence is supplied) can be used to explain the position of agreement markers.