Aleut suffixal adjectives and head movement

(monolingual elicitation with elders in Anchorage, Alaska)

Aleut nominals can be modified by what I have termed “suffixal adjectives”, which appear between the noun stem and case/number morphology.

1. hla-kucha-x̂
   boy-little-ABS.sg
   `the little boy’

However, under certain conditions, these suffixal adjectives can appear deep within the morphology of verbs, between the stem and tense.

1. Hla-kucha-x̂ mika-ku-x̂.
   boy-little-ABS.sg play-PRES-3.sg
   ‘The little boy is playing.’

2. Mika-kucha-ku-x̂.
   play-little-PRES-3.sg
   `The little one is playing.’

In my first qualifying paper, I analyze these suffixal adjectives as adjuncts to NP, but also argue that they are undergoing head movement to appear within the verbal complex. Specifically, I show how a particular interpretation of Harizanov & Gribanova (2019)’s “amalgamation” can grant head movement from adjunct and specifier positions, thus producing words as in (3).

See this link for the full paper from Natural Language & Linguistic Theory.