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The present article provides a case study of the forms corresponding to the meaning 'small' in Swedish, which exhibit a number-based suppletive alternation: descriptively, liten appears in the singular while små appears in the plural. We demonstrate that this alternation is best treated as contextual allomorphy, and provide six arguments that favor this account over a plausible alternative, according to which the forms realize two distinct roots with different lexical semantics. We situate a Distributed Morphology-based account of the alternation within the broader context of inflection in the language, and address challenges and complications to the allomorphy approach from outside of the root's 'typical' adjectival contexts, including adverbs and compounding. This study supports the existence of root suppletion conditioned by inflectional features, and has implications for our understanding of locality conditions on root suppletion as well as contextual allomorphy more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indefinite and possessive pronouns in German such as ein-es ‘one’ and mein-er ‘mine’ bear strong inflectional endings unlike their determiner counterparts. Following Saab and Lipták (Stud Linguist 70(1):66-108, 2016), I argue that this difference in inflection is due to NP ellipsis, which creates a ‘stranded’ affix that subsequently docks onto the determiner. Assuming that adjectives are reattached by Local Dislocation allows us to account for the descriptive observation that the determiner and pronominal paradigms differ only in the same three exceptional cases where determiners do not bear overt inflection. Furthermore, I discuss how this approach can extend to similar data from Afrikaans, Dutch and English, as well as to split topicalization constructions in German. This analysis provides further support for Saab and Lipták’s proposal that inflection emerges as a direct result of ellipsis, rather than constituting part of the licensing conditions on ellipsis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a few linguistic and bio-futuristic musings in honor of Alan Turing and his legacy. We follow some of the connections Turing used or made between humanness, language, intelligence, deception, gender, sexual orientation, and computational modeling in his exploration of the world. We also take inspiration and continue further along some of these lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses varieties of German with respect to noun pluralisation, with a focus on the status of final plural schwa as in Fisch-e ‘fish, pl.’. By analysing the much-discussed plural morphology of Standard German by means of both prosodic as well as morphological principles, it is argued that final schwa in plural nouns of Standard German is not, as generally assumed, an inflectional suffix. As an alternative, an optimality-theoretic constraint-based analysis of final schwa in plurals leads to the proposal that this segment in noun plurals of Standard German arises as an inserted vowel, which is in turn the result of a specific constraint interaction. In the second part of this paper, related noun plurals are studied in a sample of diverse non-standard dialects of German. Morphological and prosodic constraints, through the well-known mechanism of differences in constraint-ranking in Optimality Theory, derive the (non-)appearance of word-final plural schwas in these dialects which are minimally different from Standard German and from each other. The constraints will include those which refer to properties of whole paradigms of word forms, not just to phonological properties of individual words. As an overall descriptive result, a micro-typology of plural formation in varieties of German emerges, and the prosodic phonology of German is demonstrated to play a crucial role in the formation of word forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stability of a rotating gas-dust gravitating disk in the zone of a possible inflection in the angular velocity is examined theoretically. The stability limits are found for a rather wide range of curves in a special model of a dusty, pressure-free medium with the general gravitational field of the galaxy taken into account. Applications to real galaxies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]