The iconicity of affix order

Abstract This chapter investigates to what extent the relationship between an affix and its position in the word is influenced by iconicity. Two affix-order strategies are recognized: template morphology (stipulated fixed order whereby affixes are assigned to slots) and layered morphology (step-by-step derivation involving semantic scope, as a rule). Meaning is associated with words, affixes, and positions. The iconicity of affix order varies from low (templatic) to high (scopal), with mixed templatic-scopal systems in between. The mirror principle and the relevance principle relate affix order to word order. Affix-order systems of many languages, initially analyzed as templatic, have, when more data became available, later been reanalyzed as scopal. A scopal relationship is easier to detect in combinations of two affixes (bigrams) than in longer sequences. Unmotivated affix-order patterns, if analyzed in terms of bigrams and trigrams, turn out to be regular patterns. Affix order tends to be iconic.