Mixed clitics in Udi

The lexical verb as interface

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the hybrid properties of subject agreement markers in the Udi language, which exhibit properties of both affixes and clitics. Through detailed analysis of their syntactic and morphological behaviour, including phenomena such as infixation, suffixation and edge inflection, we show that the realisation of these markers is not only sensitive to information structure (focus), as argued by Harris (2002, 1996), but also to the internal morphological structure of the verb. Building on previous work on Sorani Kurdish (Salehi & Koenig, 2023), our HPSG analysis treats this hybrid status as an instance of delegated inflection, thereby enabling a modular account of the alternation between lexical and phrasal affixation.