Untangling Leti Infixation

Abstract

Leti(nese) is an Austronesian language spoken on the island of Leti, just east of Timor. Descriptions of Leti include Jonker (1932) and van Engelenhoven (1995a, 1996). In this paper, I focus on Leti infixation, a little-studied aspect of Leti morphology. In Leti, infixation yields nouns from verb roots. There are eight distinct phonological forms of the nominalizing affix: the three infixes -ni-, -n-, -i- ; the three prefixes ni-, i-, nia- ; the parafix i- + -i- ; and a zero allomorph. Leti nominalizing infixation poses two serious problems of analysis. The first challenge is to properly predict the distribution and shape of the eight allomorphs. A second problem is accounting for the fact that some of the sound patterns that result from infixation are exactly the opposite of those predicted by Optimality approaches like those of Prince and Smolensky (1993). In this paper I demonstrate how the eight allomorphs of the nominalizing affix can be derived from two basic allomorphs via phonological rules, with allomorph selection related to verb class. There appears to be no phonological motivation for the treatment of /ni-/ as a prefix that has been shifted to infixal position due to dominant phonological constraints. The positioning of /-ni-/ must be morphologically specified, either in terms of an infixation rule or some constraint-based equivalent