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, recently accepted for publication with minor revisions at Natural Language & Linguistic Theory.