Discontinuous first person agreement in Semitic and postsyntactic modularity

Abstract

Semitic agreement is normally discontinuous (i.e. expressed by more than one affix on the verb) only in the second and third persons. However, in restricted cases in particular languages, first person agreement is also discontinuous. I discuss two types of first person discontinuities. The first manifests the hallmarks of a meta split, persisting across paradigms and exponents. I argue that this type of first person discontinuity arises due to postsyntactic Fission which separates antagonistic sets of features prior to insertion and which is driven by markedness constraints on feature coexponence. The second type of first person discontinuity is restricted to a single paradigm and does not evince true discontinuous bleeding effects. Such discontinuities are best captured via morphological Doubling, modeled via Generalized Reduplication. First person discontinuities thus provide strong empirical support for the autonomy of morpheme splitting rules and morpheme copying rules. I demonstrate that each type of rule has a distinct empirical signature and acts as a repair to a different kind of morphotactic constraint. Consequently, there must be more than one route to discontinuous agreement.