A Parallel Approach to Mobile Affixation in Huave

Abstract

Huave exhibits "mobile affixation", whereby the placement of individual affixes varies depending on the phonological properties of affix and stem. Kim (2008, 2010) analyzed these facts within a cyclic cophonology approach through the interaction between alignment constraints (McCarthy & Prince, 1993) and the phonological constraints *CC and DEP. Using the same core components, this paper develops an alternative, fully parallel analysis.

In this approach, morphemes are unordered in the phonological input, every morpheme is indexed to its own (crucially gradient) alignment constraint, and output ordering is determined entirely through simultaneous constraint interaction. Notably, this analysis captures a previously unnoticed generalization about the stability of left/right order between affixes in the language.

The main contribution of this new analysis is that it provides a principled distinction between mobile and immobile affixes: the order of affixes, as determined by the relative ranking of their alignment constraints, correlates with their ability to trigger epenthesis, as determined by their ranking relative to DEP. This follows from a parallel approach with a single language-wide ranking, but not from a cyclic cophonology account. Furthermore, this distinction can be tied directly to morphosyntactic structure via Zukoff's (2020) "Mirror Alignment Principle" and considerations of Base-Derivative faithfulness (Benua, 1997).