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Inflectional Paradigms

Content and Form at the Syntax-Morphology Interface

Gregory Stump author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:30th Dec '15

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Inflectional Paradigms cover

This book explains inflectional paradigms' role as the grammatical nexus at which mismatches between words' content and form are resolved.

Sometimes dismissed as linguistically epiphenomenal, inflectional paradigms are, in reality, the interface of a language's morphology with its syntax and semantics. Drawing on abundant linguistic evidence, Stump develops a new theoretical framework to explicate the centrality of paradigms in resolving the frequent and varied mismatches between words' form and content.Sometimes dismissed as linguistically epiphenomenal, inflectional paradigms are, in reality, the interface of a language's morphology with its syntax and semantics. Drawing on abundant evidence from a wide range of languages (French, Hua, Hungarian, Kashmiri, Latin, Nepali, Noon, Old Norse, Sanskrit, Turkish, Twi and others), Stump examines a variety of mismatches between words' content and form, including morphomic patterns, defectiveness, overabundance, syncretism, suppletion, deponency and polyfunctionality. He demonstrates that such mismatches motivate a new grammatical architecture in which two kinds of paradigms are distinguished: content paradigms, which determine word forms' syntactic distribution and semantic interpretation, and form paradigms, which determine their inflectional realization. In this framework, the often nontrivial linkage between a lexeme's content paradigm and its stems' form paradigm is the nexus at which incongruities of content and form are resolved. Stump presents clear and precise analyses of a range of morphological phenomena in support of this theoretical innovation.

'Inflectional paradigms is an excellent book combining clarity of exposition, rich empirical coverage and theoretical sophistication. … I would like to recommend Stump's new book to all interested in morphological typology and theories of syntax-morphology interface, including not only linguists of a more theoretical stance, but typologists and descriptive linguists as well.' Peter M. Arkadiev, The Linguist List

ISBN: 9781107460850

Dimensions: 228mm x 152mm x 17mm

Weight: 450g

239 pages