Principles of affix ordering: An overview

Abstract

This article provides an introduction to factors that are involved in the ordering of affixes that are word-class preserving in languages with complex morphology. On the one hand, grammatical principles are proposed, including semantic, syntactic, phonological, and morphological ones. On the other hand, affix ordering is sometimes considered to be arbitrary from a synchronic perspective, with affixes occurring in an order specified by a template. Finally, extra-grammatical factors such as frequency, productivity, and parsability are argued to be important in determining affix ordering. I focus on synchronic grammatical principles in languages that have received less attention in the literature.