A Distributed Morphology Analysis of Present Tense Auxiliaries in Zamudio

Abstract

We provide an analysis of the morphology of present indicative auxiliary verbs in Zamudio Basque. In doing so we present an illustration of the theory of Distributed Morphology and the post-syntactic rules that obscure a fairly regular and well-structured syntactically generated auxiliary complex. We provide the inventory of morphemes for ergative, dative, and absolutive agreement and the auxiliary root, and propose a set of morphological operations that interact in a derivation to yield the surface forms of the auxiliary complex. The phenomena under discussion include root allomorphy based on transitivity, co-occurrence restrictions on identical person features, and post-syntactic rules of feature deletion. The resulting model is one in which the intricate distribution of morphemes within the auxiliary complex is regulated by a number of orchestrated grammatical mechanisms.