Agglutination with infixes to consonant roots?

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MoonRightRomantic
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Agglutination with infixes to consonant roots?

Post by MoonRightRomantic »

An agglutinative language is one which has a strict 1:1 correspondence between phonograms (i.e. a string of one or more phonemes) and morphemes.

Afroasiatic languages are characterized by inflection through prefixes, suffixes and infixes added to a “root” consisting of one or more consonants.

It stands to reason that these two methods could be combined. However, I am still unsure on the formal definitions. Does a language still count as agglutinative if it inflects through infixes?
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sangi39
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Re: Agglutination with infixes to consonant roots?

Post by sangi39 »

I seem to recall that Malay is considered to be an agglutinative language and it makes use of infixes. I think that might be true of a few other Austronesian languages (Tagalog and Cebuano maybe?), but I'm not sure.
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Re: Agglutination with infixes to consonant roots?

Post by Creyeditor »

Right, phillipine languages are pretty close to what you said. They allow strings of affixes, each expressing one category, as well as infixes. If you believe in a proto-type-like definition of agglutinative (i.e. like an idealized Turkish) then infixes might be a deviation from the prototype. If we take your definition of agglutinative (1:1 correspondence between phonograms (i.e. a string of one or more phonemes) and morphemes) infixes might also be a deviation. I will explain first how I understand your definition.

A morpheme is a piece of grammatical/lexical information that is not further dividable, e.g. 'dog' or nominative case.
A string is a contigious finite sequence of symbols.
A phoneme is an abstract segment associated with phonological features that are contrastive in the language.

This excludes several deviations. The first one that comes to mind, are some kinds of allomorphy patterns, where one and the same morpheme might be expressed by different allomorphs in different contexts. This is therefore a many-to-one correspondence. Note that regular allophony is not excluded, since phonemes are defined as contrastive.
The second one are homonyms. In this case one and the same 'phonogram' can express different morphemes. This is therefore a one-to-many correspondence. I actually think that this exists in all natlangs probably.
The third deviation is cumulative exponence. If one phonogram expresses more than one morpheme at a time, this is a one-to-many correspondence. An example would be the German plural dative suffix -n, which expresses both case and number. If you consider infixed forms as non-dividable, you might say that they are a case of cumulative exponence, but I think they fit better into the next category.
The fourth deviation is a situation when you need more than one phonogram to express a morpheme. Circumfixes are probably the best known case. Here 'contigious' becomes important again. Since the prefixal and the suffixal part of a circumfix are not contigious, we have to count these as two phonograms. German ge-brach-t has a circumfix ge- -t which expresses the category participle. Similarly, if you have an infix, you split up the stem. Let's say the infix <-plu-> would express the meaning plural and the root <dog> the meaning 'dog'. If you put these together, you get <do-plu-g>. The root is now not a contigious string anymore. From the above definition, 'dog' would now correspond to two phonograms. Therefore, infixes are a deviation from your definition of agglutinatuíve

Of course there are less strict and more practical definitions of agglutinative. You could, e.g., for both of these dimension calculate the distance D from a one-to-one correspondence and then call 1/D the agglutination ratio of a language.

tl;dr If you define strings as contigious sequences, infixes are a deviation from your definition of agglutinative. I still like the idea though. Long infix strings would really be fun.
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