Otseqon verb morphology

Purpose
This document is mainly to allow the reader to parse the structure of Otseqon words. As such it is presently light on semantics. For more involved discussion of the meanings of various affixes, consult the upcoming Otseqon Grammar Dictionary.

Note on orthography
In most of this wiki the orthography used is more or less phonetic and designed to aid an English speaker in pronunciation, for example the palatalized allophones of /s/ and /ʦ/ are written 〈sh〉 and 〈ch〉, the uvular allophone of /k/ is written as 〈q〉, and intervocalically voiced plosives are written as such. Because this document deals with phonemes, the orthography used is a bit different and 1-to-1 reflects the phonology. Everything is identical to IPA except that 〈c〉 is used for /ʦ/ and 〈y〉 is used for /j/.

Verb stems
Otseqon morphemes are separated into three morphological classes: consonant-final, vowel-final, and N-final. Vowel-final morphemes are the most basic and their citation form is exactly the same as the stem form for morphological purposes. Consonant-final morphemes underlying end with a consonant, but due to a prohibition against word-final consonants have an echo vowel in the citation form, e.g. the stem hak surfaces as haka but is treated for most morphological purposes as though it ended with a k. N-final morphemes end with a syllabic N and are for most purposes treated identically to vowel-final stems, except that the final -N becomes -ri when an additional -N is suffixed, for example the word ken + the middle voice morpheme -N becomes kerin.

This is not just a property of roots but also of any suffixing morpheme.

Note that the stem of a verb is not entirely predictable from its citation form. All words that do not have identical last two vowels are vowel-final, but not all words with repeated vowels are consonant-final stems, e.g. /saka/ ‘’ is a vowel-final stem ending with -a, not a consonant-final stem ending with -k. In general, identical-vowel morphemes with a final syllable with a voiced onset are vowel-final, and a voiceless onset are usually consonant-final but are unpredictable.

Monosyllabic roots
Otseqon has a constraint on minimal phonological words, that they must be at least bimoraic. Roots that are a single light syllable have their vowel lengthened in citation form to fill this constraint. This long vowel goes away when additional morphemes are added. Some monosyllabic roots really are underlyingly heavy, in which case they maintain their long vowel when additional material is added to the word.

Tone
Morphemes are either toneless or high toned (H). For a description of Otseqon tonal processes, see Otseqon phonology § Tonal phonology.

Aspect
Roots are unmarked for aspect by default and receive a habitual, characteristic interpretation, temporally non-specific and outside of the flow of events of the discussion. In order to receive an interpretation as a specific event they must be marked for aspect, perfective or imperfective.

Imperfective
Imperfective aspect is marked by reduplication of the root stem. The reduplication pattern is the full verb stem, sans tone, with any long vowels shortened. It is the stem that is reduplicated, not the full citation form, meaning that for consonant-final stems the echo vowel is not reduplicated unless needed to repair the syllable structure.

Examples:


 * sawa ⇒ sawasawa
 * tiice ⇒ tiicetice
 * kírí ⇒ kíríkiri
 * nii ⇒ niri
 * kas(a) ⇒ kaskasa
 * tak(a) ⇒ taktaka ⇒ tattaka
 * sap(a) ⇒ sapsapa ⇒ sapasapa