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Mobile object Markers in MORO: The role of tone

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Peter Jenks and
Sharon Rose
Peter Jenks*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Sharon Rose*
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
*
[jenks@berkeley.edu]
[rose@ling.ucsd.edu]
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Extract

Object markers alternate between a prefix and a suffix position in the Thetogovela dialect of Moro, an underdocumented Kordofanian language of Sudan. Although the alternation appears to depend on the morphosyntactic category of verb forms, we show that it actually follows from the tonal properties of these verb forms. Verb stems that are usually marked with a default, phonologically predictable leftmost high tone select prefix object markers. The high-toned prefix object marker appears inside the stem, and its high tone serves as the default tone of the stem, obviating the need for inserted high tone. Verb stems that impose other tone patterns, either all high or all low, select suffix object markers, a fact that we attribute to the incompatibility of high-toned prefix object markers with all-high and all-low tone patterns. The data are analyzed as a case of phonology conditioning prefix placement and overriding standard suffix position. Although such phonologically determined mobile affixes are rare in the world’s languages, the Moro case provides a new example of affix mobility based on a novel property, tone, and it underscores the need to incorporate such cases into the architecture of grammatical systems.

Keywords

object markertonemobile affixationMorophonology-morphology interface

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 91 , Issue 2 , June 2015, pp. 269 - 307
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

We are extremely grateful to Elyasir Julima and Ikhlas Elahmer for the countless hours spent sharing the Moro language with us. We also wish to thankAngelo Naser for additional discussion. Audio files of the examples in this article can be found at http://moro.ucsd.edu/. We thank audiences at MIT, UC Santa Cruz, Stanford University, UC San Diego, the 41st Annual Conference on African Linguistics at the University of Toronto, and the Phonology in the 21st Century conference at McGill University for valuable feedback. We especially thank the other members of the Moro Language Project for challenging comments and discussions of these data: Farrell Ackerman, George Gibbard, Laura Kertz, and Andrew Strabone. We gratefully acknowledge comments from Olivier Bonami, Gabriela Caballero, Rebecca Colavin, Larry Hyman, Sharon Inkelas, and Andrew Nevins, as well as those of the referees and the editor. This research is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. 0745973. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

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