Call for papers:

It is widely known that suffixes outnumber prefixes in inflectional morphology. Specifically, WALS feature 26A ‘Prefixing vs. Suffixing in Inflectional Morphology’ (Dryer 2013) counts 529 suffixing languages and only 152 prefixing languages. While the asymmetries in the distribution of prefixes and suffixes have been known for long, recent studies reveal asymmetries in their morphophonological behaviour, as well. Concretely, Krämer (2002) shows that dominant-recessive vowel harmonies can only be triggered by suffixes but not prefixes. An exhaustive study on prosodic patterns in Lithuanian by Kushnir (2018) reveals that there are four different prosodic patterns in suffixes but only one pattern in prefixes. Moreover, Luís (2009) argues that enclitics in European Portuguese are part of the grammatical word, while the same elements as proclitics are not. While asymmetries like these are frequently described in the literature, theoretic accounts that capture this phenomenon (at least partially) are quite rare (Hyman 2002; Himmelmann 2014; Moskal 2015). This workshop aims to bring together linguists working on different aspects of the phenomenon to initiate an empirically adequate modelling of the phenomenon. In this workshop, we want to cover theoretical as well as empirical aspects of prefix-suffix asymmetries with a focus on research on non-European languages. Thus, we are looking forward to contributions that provide insights in the following areas: theoretical phonology, theoretical morphology, typology and psycholinguistics.

Invited speaker: Yuni Kim (University of Essex)

The questions we want to address include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Are there asymmetries in phonological processes within or across languages?

• Are there asymmetries in affix order within or across languages?

• How can these asymmetries be modelled in linguistic theory?

• What are possible explanations for the suffix-preference?

• Do morphosyntactic categories (tense, agreement, case, ...) exhibit different degrees of asymmetries?