Ambifixes: Typology and diachrony (TyDiAm)

My DFG project at the University of Potsdam (2024-2027).

This is a project on the morphological typology of ambifixes (affixes that can occur both as prefixes and as suffixes), which I started together with Yury Lander back in 2020 (see Arkadiev & Lander 2020, 2021, 2022 below). I am now able to continue working on it in a really serious way thanks to the financial support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the hospitality of the Potsdam Typology Lab

General Abstract

The main objective of the project is to study ambifixes in the languages of the world. Ambifixes are affixes (grammatical morphemes) that, depending on certain conditions, can occur both before and after the root. An example of ambifix is the Lithuanian verbal reflexive morpheme “si”, which occurs word-finally if the verb does not contain any prefixes (rodo-si ‘it seems’) or immediately before the root if the verb contains a prefix (ne-si-rodo ‘it does not seem’). Ambifixes occur in a number of languages across the globe, including some of the European languages, but they have never been systematically studied. The project will explore ambifixes from two different perspectives. The first perspective is typological. It aims at creating a comprehensive catalogue of ambifixes from many diverse languages belonging to different language families and spoken in different areas, and at classifying ambifixes along a number of parameters. The most important of these parameters concerns the factors that determine whether a given ambifix occurs before or after the root. These factors include the phonology of the root or word (for example whether it starts with a consonant or a vowel), its morphological make-up (for example, whether it contains a prefix or not), the word’s lexical class (for example, whether it is a noun or an adjective), its grammatical properties (for example, whether the verb is in the present or in the past tense), and potentially some others. The second perspective is diachronic or historical. It aims at discovering and investigating the types of grammatical elements and constructions that ambifixes can arise from, the pathways of change by which they develop, and, among other things, to try to understand why ambifixes are rather infrequent in the languages of the world. This project is important for linguistics because it aims to study an intriguing morphological phenomenon that has not received enough attention so far and whose detailed investigation can throw new light on the kinds of morphological structures found in the world’s languages, on the rules that organise these morphological structures and relate them to other levels of language, and on the mechanisms and pathways of language change.

Materials

Arkadiev, Peter. Complex predicates as source constructions for non-canonical affixation. Submitted to Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft special issue on complex predicates edited by Andrej Malchukov & Patryk Czerwiński. Revised version, August 2026. pdf

I investigate the fate of affixes occurring on the components of verbal complex predicates (VCPs) when the latter undergo univerbation and give rise to new morphological structures. I use as a starting point a calculus of logically possible combinations of values of such parameters as inflectability of each component, their mutual order, and the prefixal resp. suffixal orientation of the relevant markers. After reviewing the more straightfoward cases, I focus on those types of VCP that give rise to multiple exponence and ambifixation. While univerbation of VCPs has been recently recognised as one of the cross-linguistically recurrent sources of multiple exponence, the phenomenon of ambifixation (occurrence of the same affix as both prefix and suffix) and its diachronic origins have hardly been studied. On the basis of a number of examples from diverse languages, I show how univerbation of VCPs of different kinds and in morphological systems of different types leads to the emergence of patterns of ambifixation with morphological and lexical types of conditioning. I also address the question why, even though univerbation of VCPs is a typologically recurrent pathway towards both multiple exponence and ambifixation, both phenomena are relatively infrequent as opposed to simple suffixation and prefixation.

Arkadiev, Peter. Towards a diachronic typology of ambifixation. Talk at the 22nd International Morphology Meeting, Budapest, 18-21 June 2026. pdf

Arkadiev, Peter. 2025. Towards a typology and diachrony of ambifixation. Invited talk at the Uppsala Typology Seminar, University of Uppsala, 7. October 2025. pdf

Arkadiev, Peter. 2025. Complex predicates as source constructions for non-canonical affixation. Talk at the Final conference of the ComPLETE project, Sorbonne Nouvelle & École normale supérieure, Paris, 12-14 May 2025. pdf

Arkadiev, Peter. 2024. Typology and diachrony of ambifixes: some preliminary observations. Invited keynote talk at the 21st International Morphology Meeting, Vienna, 28–30 August 2024. pdf

Arkadiev, Peter & Yury Lander. 2022. Ambifixes: Cross-linguistic variation and possible origins. Invited talk at Princeton Phonology Forum “The wheres and whens of affixation”, 2–3 December 2022 (online). pdf

Arkadiev, Peter & Yury Lander. 2021. Towards a typology of ambifixes. Poster presentation at the 5th American International Morphology Meeting, Ohio State University, online, 26–29 August 2021. pdf

Аркадьев П.М., Ю.А. Ландер. 2020. Амбификсы и другие звери. // А.А. Кибрик и др. (ред.), ВАПросы языкознания: Мегасборник наностатей к юбилею В. А. Плунгяна. Москва: «Буки-Веди», 2020, с. 35–42. pdf