Derived nouns and structured inflection in oneida

It is often assumed, particularly in inferential-realizational ap proaches to infiection (Anderson 1992; Stump 2001), that inFIectional mor phology is "fiat", i.e. does not involve internal constituency or intermediary lexical categories. We argue in this paper on the basis of the derivation of nouns from verbs that the infiectional prefixes of Oneida (Northern Iroquoian) form a fiat template, but that the infiectional suffixes belong to a different layer from the prefixes. We further argue that verb-To-noun derivation is se mantically transparent in Oneida in that lexical category follows ontological sorts and category-changing derivation is always accompanied by ontological change, from situation descriptions to object descriptions. Finally, we suggest that verb-To-noun derivation plays a special role in the Oneida lexicon as so many names of everyday object categories are derived from verbs and that verbs behave as the only open class in the language.