Deconstructing exuberant exponence in Batsbi

In this article, I shall discuss “exuberant exponence” in Batsbi (Harris 2009), an extreme case of extended exponence where identical gender-number markers can surface multiple times within the same word, subject to the presence of certain triggering stems or affixes. I shall also evaluate in some detail the challenge the Batsbi data pose for extant formal theories of inflection and show that these challenges cut across the divide between lexical and inferential theories. In the analysis, I shall highlight the dependent nature of the agreement exponents and propose a formal account that draws crucially on two central properties of Information-based Morphology, namely the recognition of many-to-many relations at the most fundamental level of description, and the possibility to extract (partial) generalisations over rules by means of cross-classifying inheritance hierarchies. As a result, cross-classification of agreement rule types with those for the triggering stems and affixes will capture the dependent nature directly, while at the same time ensuring the reuse of inflectional resources. Thus, the decomposition of Batsbi exuberant exponence improves considerably over a pure word-based approach and emphasises the need to afford both atomistic and holistic views within a theory of inflection.