Circumscriptive morphemes

The aim of this paper is to present evidence for a hitherto unrecognized type of morpheme: a haplologizing reduplicant, dubbed a 'circumscriptive morpheme' here. Unlike standard reduplicants, these morphemes coalesce with phonological material instead of copying it. Circumscriptive morphemes are shown to be essential in accounting for morphologically induced lengthening and reduplicative infixation in the Polynesian language Maori. Other potential applications--as in parsing-out circumscription truncation, and subtractive morphology--are also discussed