Affix Repetition and Non-Redundancy in Inflectional Morphology

Abstract

The paper investigates the general validity of an economy requirement that precludes redundant affixation in inflection.This requirement is known as "Non-Redundancy" in Minimalist Morphology (Wunderlich & Fabri 1996), the framework used here, but also has equivalents in other current approaches to inflection.In various case studies from different languages I inspect constructions that involve several occurrences of an inflectional affix within a word-form -informally referred to as "affix repetition" -and therefore apparently give rise to violations of Non-Redundancy.I argue that each token of these affixes is informative in the strict sense of positive feature specification: either, two homophonous affixes cooccurring in the same word have in fact different formal specifications (Chichewa, Icelandic, Avar), or affix repetition results from languagespecific interactions of word formation and inflection (Breton, Archi).The most extensive part is concerned with the phenomenon of pre-prefixed adjectives of Chichewa, where the two affix tokens involved belong to different sets of prefixes.I show that the outer qualifying prefixes derive the category of adjectives and therefore provide information not contained in the inner affixation.The overall implication of the individual analyses proposed is that a strong assumption of Minimalist Morphology can be maintained: the status of Non-Redundancy is not that of a violable constraint, but rather that of an inviolable principle of inflection, thus crucially restricting the generative capacity of morphology.

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