The No Blur Principle meets Norwegian dialects*

Abstract

The No Blur Principle (NBP) is confronted with developments in Norwegian dialects. The NBP helps us explain why the suffixes of the most productive class do not become Ôsuper-stableÕ: that would have entailed a violation of the NBP. If affixes associated with the most productive class have become super-stable, something has been done with other suffixes, so the NBP is complied with, by and large. The NBP did not have to ÔbiteÕ, for the suffix distribution is partly extra-morphologically motivated. This indicates a Ôbelts-and-bracesÕ strategy to ensure inflectional distinctness. The paper also presents arguments in favour of Natural Morphology.

Where does heteroclisis come from? Evidence from Romanian dialects

“…The first line, as we have seen, limits its diffusion to the 19 See, for example, Stump (2005); Halle and Marantz (2008); but cf. also Enger (2007). 20 I do not mean by this that every case of inflectional 'blur' introduced by a sound change necessarily triggers conjugation shift.…”

Vocabular Clarity and insular Scandinavian: A response to Ϸorgeirsson

“…Furthermore, the NPB/VC has seen some achievements, also on the empirical side. For Scandinavian, it has helped us provide an account: why the genitive was lost so early (Enger 2013a) why the suffix typically associated with the subjunctive and with a nonmajority class should spread in Faroese verbs in the present (Enger 2016) why a present-tense suffix typically associated with a non-majority class could become predominant in Norwegian (Enger 2007) over a suffix associated with a majority class Outside of Scandinavian, there are many more cases; for instance, NBP/VC seems to shed light on particular developments in Romance (see Maiden : 104, 2005. In my view, this is not a bad record.…”