Finnish verbal affix order: When it distorts the Mirror Principle

In this paper, we investigate Finnish verbal affix order, with a focus on reflexive, causative and passive markers. Our data not only reveal affix cooccurrence restriction and affix interpretation variation, but they also show that Finnish affix order does not fully comply with the Mirror Principle as depicted by Baker (1985) nor with any other existing model. Instead, we propose two different models integrating the Mirror Principle among other morphological and syntactic constraints: an approach based on a stratal application of the Optimality Theory, and an approach using a set of morphosyntactic operations, ruled by a ‘specificity’ principle.