Concatenation occurs one morpheme at a time: Infixation in Choctaw

Abstract

In this paper we show that phonological spellout must occur one morpheme at a time, and in an order that is sensitive to hierarchical structure, rather than the linear order of morphemes present in the surface form. We argue that this sensitivity to hierarchical structure reflects the absence of a phase-wide linearization step in phonological derivation. Instead, the phonological content of each morpheme is concatenated to the linear stem and the full form is computed for each morpheme, moving up the morphosyntactic tree. We base our arguments on verb forms with two different aspectual infixes in Choctaw (Muskogean), which exhibit interwoven interactions between phonological and morphological processes, making it possible to identify the necessary order of concatenation and derivation steps in order to generate correct phonological forms.