Work

Deriving inflectional irregularity

Year: 2005

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Conventional wisdom holds that productive morphology is regular morphology. Drawing evidence from French, we argue that the description of many lexeme formation processes is simplified if we hold that a productive rule may give rise to inflectionally irregular lexemes. We argue that the notion of a stem space allows for a straightforward description of this phenomenon: each lexeme comes equipped with a vector of possibly distinct stems, which serve as bases for inflectional form construction. The stem space is structured by default relations which encode the regular pattern of inflection; (partial) irregularities occur when a lexeme specifies a stem space violating the default relations. Derived irregularity is then the effect of a productive lexeme formation rule which specifies an irregular stem space for its output.

Source: Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

DOI: 10.21248/hpsg.2006.20

Authors: Olivier Bonami, Gilles Boyé

Institutions: Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, Paris-Sorbonne University, Laboratoire Cognition, Langues, Langage, Ergonomie

Language: English

Topic: Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

OpenAlex ID: W2155651396

FWCI: 11

Cites: 14

Cited by: 30

Related to: 10