Morphosyntactic complexity: A typology of lexical splits

Abstract

A key notion in understanding language is 'possible word (lexeme)'. While there are lexemes that are internally homogeneous and externally consistent, we find others with splits in their internal structure (morphological paradigm) and inconsistencies in their external behavior (syntactic requirements). I first explore the characteristics of the most straightforward lexemes, in order to establish a point in the theoretical space from which we can calibrate the real examples we find. I then schematize the interesting phenomena that deviate from this idealization, including suppletion, syncretism, deponency, and defectiveness. Next I analyze the different ways in which lexemes are 'split' by such phenomena. I set out a typology of possible splits, along four dimensions: splits that are (i) based on the composition/feature signature of the paradigm versus those based solely on morphological form; (ii) motivated (following a boundary motivated from outside the paradigm) versus purely morphology-internal ('morphomic'); (iii) regular (extending across the lexicon) versus irregular (lexically specified); (iv) externally relevant versus irrelevant: we expect splits to be internal to the lexeme, but some have external relevance (they require different syntactic behaviors).I identify instances of these four dimensions separately: they are orthogonal, and therefore not dependent on each other. Their interaction gives a substantial typology, and it proves to be surprisingly complete: the possibilities specified are all attested. The typology also allows for the unexpected patterns of behavior to overlap in particular lexemes, producing some remarkable examples. Such examples show that the notion 'possible word' is more challenging than many linguists have realized.*

Pluralia tantum nouns and the theory of features: a typology of nouns with non-canonical number properties

“…Let us turn to further examples which fill out the typology of pluralia tantum, and then briefly consider other number effects which are non-canonical according to this criterion. In the canonical world, paradigms are consistent, but of course we find many instances of paradigms that are split (Corbett 2015a). In a sense, all pluralia tantum nouns have a split paradigm, in that a part of it is lacking.…”

Morphome interactions

“…This paper has presented a preliminary typologization of how different (meta)morphomic elements can exist together in the same inflectional system or in the paradigm of a single lexeme. This is done in the same vein as recent work (Corbett 2015) dealing with lexical splits more generally. As in that work, all the logically possible configurations (disjoint, overlapping and subset relations) have been found here to exist in natural languages.…”

Possessors in switch-reference

“…If inalienable possession is a canonical possessive relation, as proposed by Nikolaeva & Spencer (2013) within the framework of Canonical Typology (Brown & Chumakina 2013;Corbett 2015;Bond 2019), the generalisation in (40) can be thought of as an implicational relation on canonical and less canonical types of possession: if a language allows a less canonical possessive relation between two SR pivots to license ss-marking, it will also allow more canonical possessive relations to do so. Recall that we understand "inalienable" as "part-whole" in the context of SR.…”