Hanink, Emily A. and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. 2025. What makes a bipartite verb? A case study from Wá·siw. In the Proceedings of the 27th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas, UBC Working Papers in Linguistics, ed. E.Hannon and B. Oliver: 121–134. Find the paper here.
So-called ‘bipartite’ verbs (Jacobsen 1980) — verbs comprised of two bound morphemes that behave monomorphemically once combined — are a well-established areal feature of the western United States. While there is much description of bipartite verbs in existing literature, they have received little in the way of theoretical analysis. In this paper, we take bipartite verbs in Wá·šiw (isolate; CA/NV) as a case study. We compare two possible lines of analysis that could explain the obligatory bipartite nature of this construction – one appealing to variation in lexical semantics, the other to variation in functional inventory. We discuss the benefits and disadvantages of both analyses, and lay out what will be required in future work to understand the theoretical core of bipartiteness.
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