Oneida prepronominal prefixes in Information-based Morphology

Oneida (Northern Iroquoian) inflectional morphology is highly complex. We focus here on the eleven so-called prepronominal prefixes. These prefixes display a number of interesting paradigmatic and syntagmatic properties that make them challenging to model in incremental or sequentialist approaches. Instead, we utilize Information-based Morphology (hereafter IbM; Crysmann and Bonami 2016), which treats inflectional rules as descriptions of regularities between features, forms, and positions. We discuss three main issues: competition for realization among semantically compatible features; borrowing of exponence from one feature realization to another; and exuberant and atypical morphotactic variability. Our analysis highlights the unique complexities of Oneida’s position class morphology and illustrates how an IbM approach is equipped to deal with such complexities.