Nonconcatenative effects in Attic Greek: Lengthening as affixation of defective phonological elements

In this paper we propose a Generalized Nonlinear Affixation (Bermúdez-Otero, 2012) analysis for the formation of nominative singular in Ancient Attic Greek nouns ending in a sonorant, i.e. /n/ /dajmon-/ [dajmɔːn] ‘demon’ and /r/ /pater-/ [patεːr] ‘father’. Adopting a Distributed Morphology approach (Halle Marantz, 1993), we propose that the exponent of the nominative singular is a floating mora and a floating [–ATR] feature, which are suffixed to the base. By doing so, we restrict the morphological patterns of nominal morphology in Attic Greek to a single concept of concatenation, since we demonstrate that a seemingly processual pattern regularly derives from concatenative affixation. Additional empirical evidence for mora affixation as exponent of a morphological category is offered by two cases of plural formation as vowel lengthening from Maricopa and Nuer, showing that such processes are crosslinguistically common and concern typologically and genetically unrelated languages.