Inflectional Paradigms
Content and Form at the Syntax-Morphology Interface

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

Gregory Stump (Author)

9781107460850, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 30 December 2015

239 pages, 33 b/w illus. 182 tables
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.45 kg

'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

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.

1. What are inflectional paradigms?
2. Canonical inflectional paradigms
3. Morphosyntactic properties
4. Lexemes
5. Stems
6. Inflection classes
7. A conception of the relation of content to form in inflectional paradigms
8. Morphomic properties
9. Too many cells, too few cells
10. Syncretism
11. Suppletion and heteroclisis
12. Deponency and metaconjugation
13. Polyfunctionality
14. Theoretical synopsis and two further issues.

Subject Areas: Grammar, syntax & morphology [CFK], Linguistics [CF], Language [C]