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With regard to change in inflection, historical linguistics fundamentally relies on the concept of morphological analogy, which is held responsible for nearly all change not attributable to phonological factors. Despite its central importance, how morphological analogy operates has never been established. Two different opinions are held in contemporary linguistics. The first position assumes that morphological analogy modifies inherited inflectional forms, making them more similar to other inflectional forms. According to the second position, in the course of morphological analogy, inherited inflectional forms are not merely modified but rather are replaced by forms created entirely anew on a model pattern already present in the grammar. This research report tries to establish what kind of data may constitute the evidence sufficient to differentiate between the two views. It argues that all relevant data point to whole-word replacement as the only mechanism of analogical change in inflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the effects of word internal morphological form variation on adult first language (L1) (n = 20) incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading. Design/methodology/approach: Participants were given a 37,611-token English novel containing pseudo words, placed throughout the text by the novelist. Two unexpected vocabulary assessments were administered at the completion of the reading task. Findings: Results showed statistically significant effects for morphological form variation, with the readers having incidentally acquired more words whose tokens did not vary in form (i.e. no exposure to inflectional or derivational variants). However, a large effect size was present only for low-frequency words (two-four exposures). Originality/value: Discussion of the results is given regarding the feasibility of enhancing adult L1 college readers' morphological awareness through extensive reading and attention-drawing tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at broadening the interdisciplinary field of linguistic typology and dialectology, through diasystemic ecology, from the standpoint of inflectional morphology. Mazatec inflectional classes and intricate patterns of paradigm diversification are scrutinized through a survey of dialect taxonomies and an overall model describing main parameters, such as subconflation, inflectional class shifts and metatypes. This approach provides as efficient a grid to observe dialect divergence and convergence as traditional isoglosses, especially considering the high degree of regularity and systematicity of inflectional class processes in the Mazatec dialect network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dutch has a construction consisting of a verbal part and something else: ′wɛrksə 'enjoy your work' (< werk 'to work'), ′rujzə 'enjoy your rowing' (< roei 'to row'). According to accepted wisdom, this 'success imperative', as it is known in the literature, consists of an imperative and a pronoun ze 'them'. The paper challenges the standard analysis and investigates two alternatives: an imperative form plus a modal particle, and a verbal stem plus an inflectional ending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vocabular Clarity is a proposed restriction on the behaviour of inflectional classes and affixes grounded in the idea of synonymy avoidance. The proponents of Vocabular Clarity claim that it holds true for Icelandic and Faroese nominal inflections. In this article, data from these languages is examined and difficulties which have not been previously addressed are pointed out. It is argued that the Vocabular Clarity approach is somewhat vaguely specified. In particular, it needs a clear operational method for distinguishing affixes and stem allomorphy. Without this, it remains uncertain whether it makes any testable predictions. The paper shows that while the theory is intuitively appealing, it is-even under fairly generous assumptions-difficult to reconcile with the insular Scandinavian data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Construction Grammar is a linguistic framework which postulates that all grammar is based on a single, relatively simple entity, the construction, defined as a conventionalized mapping between a form and a meaning. Construction Morphology is a sub-theory of Construction Grammar which deals with the word-level domain. This article shows how Construction Morphology can account for the full range of inflectional types. It argues that Construction Morphology falls into the type of morphological theory which Stump (2001) has designated ‘inferential—realizational’, and which he contends is the only kind of theory that accounts for all the known facts of morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the logic behind the various morpho-phonological subdivisions in the verbal system of Palestinian Arabic. It argues for the importance in the understanding of Palestinian Arabic of the apophonic chain proposed for Classical Arabic in 1993). In Palestinian, it is first argued, the Measure 1 perfective template includes a hard-wired association of its two vocalic positions; the main differences in vocalization between the Palestinian and Classic varieties follow from this fact. The account is then extended to include three large subclasses of weak verbs. Following the analysis of Classical Arabic in 1996), it is argued that such verbs involve a null element ø, whose realization is determined by the apophonic chain. The second part of the paper provides an account of the entire inflectional paradigms of each of the verbs discussed, a task that was not fully undertaken in previous work. The mechanism of apophony is shown to be at work in this domain, too. An interesting case is discussed of an apparent shift in inflectional paradigm in some forms of the biradical verb. This shift is again shown to follow from the general mechanisms used in the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although suppletion has attracted increasing attention in recent years, there is still no accepted dividing line between suppletion and other types of morphological irregularity. It is argued that even explicitly ahistorical treatments have been biased by diachrony, so that forms which are known to have developed from regular paradigms, e.g. Ancient Greek heîs ‘one’ ~ fem. mía or English think ~ thought, tend to be treated as less “truly” suppletive than those which have no known common source. Such cases are not only to be classified as suppletive on formal grounds, but deserve closer attention than they have heretofore received from historical linguists. Given the widespread view that morphological analogy acts to regularize paradigms which have become opaque as a result of phonological changes, suppletion of this sort may be viewed as the logical end point of sound change acting over significant time depths. Any diachronic typology of suppletion must therefore distinguish between paradigms composed of historically unrelated stems, and those whose stems have diverged through the cumulative effects of phonological change. With their long written records, Indo-European languages furnish numerous examples of the latter type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]