Conclusions
In the preceding sections I have argued that Lushootseed and Thompson/Shuswap differ in certain important ways, and that these differences can be accounted for in a unified fashion by assuming that in Lushootseed the diminutive morpheme is a prefix, while in the Interior Salish languages it is an infix. The differing forms of doubly reduplicated words were argued to follow from these differences in word structure, and the principle of subjacency, interpreted to prohibit the copying of phonemic melodies across two cyclic nodes, was argued to be a universal principle constraining the operation of morphological rules. The larger conclusion suggested by this analysis is that the morphological and the syntactic components of the grammar are not so disparate as they might appear to be at first glance; we can see the same principles operating on the level of the word and the level of the sentence.
The analysis presented above involves certain assumptions which deserve further discussion. In particular, it was assumed that infixing is the attachment of a morpheme to a phonological constituent rather than to a morphological constituent; in terms of the infix discussed above, this means that the diminutive in the Interior Salish languages is subcategorized to occur before a stressed syllable rather than before a stem, as in Lushootseed. The infix is not, at least in surface structure, integrated into the tree structure of the word; instead, it is attached in a linear fashion to some element in the phonological representation, and certain operations — the copying of the phonemic melody of a stem, in this case — can take place independently on the phonological and on the morphological tiers. This assumption raises the question of at what level and in what way infixes are related to the other morphemes of a word. A treatment of this question is beyond the scope of this paper; I will note here only that this problem is the same one faced in describing the morphological structure of languages, such as Semitic languages, which make extensive use of nonconcatenative systems of morphology (McCarthy 1981). An analysis of the relationship between the phonological structure and the morphological structure of Salish infixal words should generalize to other, more consistently nonconcatenative languages.
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Broselow, E.I. Salish double reduplications: Subjacency in morphology. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 1, 317–346 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00142469
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00142469