A Fixed Hierarchy for Wolof Verbal Affixes

0. Introduction This article examines the valence-changing verbal suffixes of Wolof, a West Atlantic language spoken primarily in Senegal and the Gambia. The challenge is to account for the various attested and ungrammatical suffix orders in forms where two or more suffixes are combined. It will be shown that a straight-forward head movement account is inadequate, if Baker’s (1998) Mirror Principle is assumed. Instead, an analysis using phrasal movement will be argued for without appealing to any head movement. Wolof verbal extensions are taken to have a derivational pattern similar to that of verbal complexes, and to be amenable to a similar analysis as in Koopman and Szabolcsi (2000). The idea behind this article is taken from an analysis sketched out in a Koopman (2004), which itself is a response to Buell and Sy (2004).