Phonological and morphological conditions on affix order in Huave

Huave, a language isolate of Mexico, has "mobile" affixes, which surface as prefixes or suffixes depending on morphophonological properties of the base to which they attach. This paper shows that despite affix mobility, the hierarchical structure of affixes is morphologically fixed. Meanwhile, the linearization algorithm for individual mobile affixes is analyzed with an Optimality-Theoretic P <M ranking schema, where phonological well-formedness constraints outrank morphological alignment constraints. The proposed model is a revision of previous P <M models in that morphological constraints are argued to be of the idiosyncratic, language-specific type previously used in subcategorization approaches to the morphology-phonology interface. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010.