Workshop at the International Morphology Meeting 22, Budapest, 28-31 May 2026

Invited speaker: Pavel Iosad (University of Edinburgh)

Principal organiser: Matthew Baerman (University of Surrey)

Call for papers

Morphological alternations can be realized through the concatenation of affixes, or through non-concatenative processes that do not involve the addition of segmental material, such as modifications of suprasegmental features (e.g. length or tone), or the featural constituents of segments (e.g. vowel height, consonantal manner of articulation). The two nouns in (1), from Nuer (a West Nilotic language of South Sudan and Ethiopia), illustrate the contrast: the plural of ‘pelican’ is formed by concatenation of a suffix, while the plural of ‘snail’ is formed by a suite of non-concatenative operations: lengthening, a change in tone, raising of the vowel, and lenition of the final consonant. 

(1)	a.	bǒ̤ːŋ	‘pelican’	~	bǒ̤ːŋ-ní̤	‘pelicans’
	b.	lwɛ̀k	‘snail’	~	lwêːːɣ	‘snails’	(Bond et al. 2020)

Accounts of morphological alternations generally regard the concatenation of affixes as the typical case. Linguistics textbooks and handbooks will typically introduce the concept of morphology through the use of suffixes, reserving examples of non-concatenative morphology, such as stem-vowel alternations, for later and more advanced stages of the discussion. Some theoretical approaches also reflect this asymmetry, taking concatenation as not just typical but as underlyingly primary, with non-concatenative process as a surface epiphenomenon (see various contributions to Trommer 2012). On the other hand, a growing body of work within a Word-and-Paradigm framework that focuses on the discriminative properties of morphological contrasts makes no principled synchronic distinction between concatenative and non-concatenative operations (Carroll & Beniamine 2025).

But even if one rejects the idea that non-concatenative morphology is somehow subordinate and therefore atypical, a curious asymmetry still emerges. Nearly every type of non-concatenative morphological alternation has a demonstrated or at least plausible origin in segmental material which has undergone phonological erosion and transformation. Thus the alternations in (1) can be traced to the phonological influence of former suffixes (Andersen 1990, 1999), likewise other familiar examples such as Indo-European ablaut (Zhivlov 2019), Germanic umlaut, or the templatic morphology of Semitic (Wilson 2020). That means it may be possible to explain all non-concatenative morphology as diachronically secondary, whatever our take on synchrony. This workshop is dedicated to exploring this proposition, and is structured around two themes:

1. Pathways to non-concatenative morphology, where we ask what the typological tendencies are and what constraints there are, if any. Possible questions include:

• Which kinds of units or domains tend to be lost or preserved? For example, it has been suggested that these typically align with prosodic categories like feet, syllables, or morae, rather than morphological or morphosyntactic categories. 
• What role does morphological redundancy play?  Non-concatenative processes often emerge in conjunction with segmental marking. Redundancy is then often resolved by losing the segment while the secondary phonological cue is retained and reinterpreted as morphological. Alternatively, prosodic material may be sacrificed instead, triggering processes like mora-sharing,metathesis, infixation, etc.
• What role does metrical structure play? For example, languages with initial metrical prominence will be more prone to erosion of suffixal segmental material.
• How does morphophonological typology affect the diachronic trajectory? For example, it is likely that systems with inward-directed phonological processes (targeting the root) will be more prone to develop non-concatenative morphology than systems with outward-directed processes.

2. Synchronic typology, where we ask how much of the attested typological landscape of non-concatenative morphology can be attributed to the diachronic transformation of affixes. 

• Are there non-concatenative processes that cannot be explained by diachrony, and must be recognized as fundamental primitives? If so, how would this affect models of synchronic morphology? And if not, would this confirm the view that all morphology is underlyingly concatenative?
• Are there non-concatenative processes that the laws of sound change could plausibly produce but which are unattested?

Submission guidelines

We invite papers (20 minutes, with 10 minutes for questions) addressing any of the above themes.

Please send an abstract of no more than one page to evoconcaten8@gmail.com by 05 January 2026. Abstracts should be anonymous and in pdf format, with identifying information in the body of the email.

All workshop enquiries should be directed to Matthew Baerman (m.baerman@surrey.ac.uk).

This workshop is offered in conjunction with the ERC Synergy project ‘NILOMORPH: The evolution of suprasegmental morphology in West Nilotic’ https://nilomorph.eu/, and will take place as part of the International Morphology Meeting 22 in Budapest, between 28-31 May 2026.

References

Andersen, T. 1990. Vowel length in western Nilotic languages. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 22. 5–26.

Andersen, Torben. 1999. Vowel quality alternation in Mabaan and its Western Nilotic history. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics. 20. 97–120.

Bond, O., T. Reid, I. Monich & M. Baerman. 2020. Nuer Lexicon. www.nuerlexicon.com.

Carroll, M., Beniamine, S. 2025. Exponence and the theory of discriminative information in paradigms. Morphology 35. 227–269.

Trommer, J. 2012. The Morphology and Phonology of Exponence. Oxford: OUP.

Wilson, D. 2020. A Concatenative Analysis Of Diachronic Afro-Asiatic Morphology. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

Zhivlov, M. 2019. Indo-Uralic and the origin of Indo-European ablaut. In The Precursors of Proto-Indo-European, ed. by A. Kloekhorst & T. Pronk, 219–235. Leiden: Brill.