While affix ordering often reflects general syntactic or semantic principles, it can also be arbitrary or variable. This article develops a theory of morpheme ordering based on local morphotactic restrictions encoded as weighted bigram constraints. I examine the formal properties of morphotactic systems, including arbitrariness, nontransitivity,…

Examines the behavior of the morpheme, um, in Toba Batak and Tagalog, which alternates as a prefix or an infix, arguing that the variation is conditioned by constraints on consonant clusters. Three patterns of variation that occur with um are described, noting that the stages involved in changing from infixed to prefixed positions over time are…