Full Description
This volume brings together specialists in inflectional morphology, historical linguistics, and dialectology to explore the processes, directionality, models, and targets of morphological analogy. The chapters draw on atlas data and historical sources, as well as experimental and computational methods, and present case studies from a range of Romance and Germanic languages. Existing work on inferential relationships, predictability, and complexity has investigated what information speakers can access with respect to the shape of inflectional forms; the studies presented here examine how speakers make use of that information and shed light on the properties and contours of inflectional structure.
The book is divided into three thematic sections that explore, respectively: the range of objects and patterns that morphological analogy can manipulate; the influence of frequency effects on the choice of models and targets in analogical change; and the mechanisms of change and how these can be modelled. The contributors discuss a variety of significant theoretical issues including the advantages of different models of analogy and inflection, constraints on the choice of template for analogy, autonomous morphology, and non-canonical inflection and morphological complexity. The historical, variationist approaches taken here will complement the considerable existing body of theoretical work in this field and will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on language change, language complexity, and word structure.
Contents
1: Xavier Bach;Louise Esher;Sascha Gaglia: Introduction: Studying variation and change in inflectional analogy
PART I Inflectional patterns and their interaction
2: Martin Maiden: Contamination as a cause of abnormal inflexion-class changes in 'Alpine' Romance, and what it tells us about word structure
3: Xavier Bach: Additive analogy maximizes left-edge identity of roots in Romance
4: Judith Meinschaefer: Analogical extension of stress patterns in artificial language learning
PART II Directionality and frequency effects
5: Hans-Olav Enger: Modal verbs in Norwegian (and Swedish): Between analogical regularization and analogical irregularization?
6: Franck Floricic: The verbs dire 'say' and venire 'come' as 'leader words' in Italo-Romance
7: Louise Esher: Productive identities spanning recurrent partials and whole word forms
PART III Processes and representations of analogy
8: Eugen Hill: Morphological analogy as whole-word replacement: Revisiting the counterevidence
9: Marc-Olivier Hinzelin: Take-over as analogical change in the creation and avoidance of syncretism and homonymy
10: John Charles Smith: Overabundance as an epiphenomenon: Competing forms or competing paradigms?
11: Erich Round: Morphomes, models, emergence, and the mind
