Abstract This study presents a typological investigation of morpheme order in nouns consisting of a stem and two affixes. It is based on a genealogically stratified sample of 773 tokens from 472 languages. The grammatical categories under scrutiny include case, definiteness, diminution, gender, number and possession. At the level of stems and affixes, stem-suffix-suffix sequences are most common, prefix-stem-suffix sequences less common and prefix-prefix-stem sequences least common. However, the proportion of stem-suffix-suffix to prefix-stem-suffix orders is subject to geographical variation. Most of the logically possible orders are actually attested. The favoured patterns are those with the nominal stem or the possessive coming first and case coming last. Three principles are argued to provide a fairly comprehensive account of the major ordering patterns. The Lexicon-before-Grammar Principle explains the high frequency of stem-initial words. The Relevance Principle successfully deals with the order of two adjacent affixes. The Person-First Principle captures the special behaviour of the possessive. These competing principles jointly generate the probabilistic ordering patterns. The same principles are found to be operative in nouns as in verbs.
Thomas Berg (Fri,) studied this question.
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