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Um Infixation and Prefixation in Toba Batak

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Megan J. Crowhurst
Megan J. Crowhurst*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
*
Department of Linguistics, University of North Carolina, CB 3155, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3155 [mjcrowhu@isis.unc.edu]
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Abstract

This report examines the behavior of a morpheme um in Toba Batak (Malayo-Polynesian) which alternates as a prefix or an infix, and argues that the observed variation is conditioned by constraints on consonant clusters. Thus, Toba Batak shows that segmental factors may crucially influence the linear position of affixes, in contrast with a wealth of cases cited in the prosodic morphology literature in support of claims that the distributional properties of morphemes are often conditioned by prosodic structure. In addition, evidence from several sources on Toba Batak suggest that um in this language has been migrating from infixed to prefixed positions over time, and that taken as a whole, the stages involved in this change are linguistically coherent. This pattern of shift has interesting implications for typology and for theories of language evolution.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 74 , Issue 3 , September 1998 , pp. 590 - 604
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 by Linguistic Society of America

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