Morphological universals and tendencies

Dunstan Brown

Morphological universals and tendencies

Language and Linguistic Science

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review

Abstract

Identifying potential universals in morphology is a particular challenge. While contemporary theories of morphology rightly emphasize elements that indicate its status as a component of grammar in its own right, this also brings with it the important issue that there are languages with little or no autonomous morphology, limiting the scope of the term ‘universal’ to a subset of languages. This is one of the reasons why the term ‘tendency’ may be preferred. There is little evidence to support the view that affix order is determined by the same syntactic principles that determine word order. For practical reasons this chapter concentrates on inflectional morphology and argues that paradigmatic contrast is key for understanding general tendencies in morphology. In particular we look at claims about constraints on paradigm structure and consider approaches that see general tendencies in terms of morphology as a system. Diachronic data is used to illustrate this.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Diachronic Linguistics
Subtitle of host publication	DiaCom
Editors	Edith Aldridge, Anne Breitbarth, Katalin É. Kiss, Adam Ledgeway, Joe Salmons, Alexandra Simonenko
Publisher	Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN (Print)	9781119898016
Publication status	Accepted/In press - 2025

Keywords

morphology
universals
paradigm structure
entropy
diachrony

Embargoed Document

Morphological universals and tendencies
Accepted author manuscript, 426 KB
Licence: Other
Embargo ends: 31/12/99

Cite this

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AB - Identifying potential universals in morphology is a particular challenge. While contemporary theories of morphology rightly emphasize elements that indicate its status as a component of grammar in its own right, this also brings with it the important issue that there are languages with little or no autonomous morphology, limiting the scope of the term ‘universal’ to a subset of languages. This is one of the reasons why the term ‘tendency’ may be preferred. There is little evidence to support the view that affix order is determined by the same syntactic principles that determine word order. For practical reasons this chapter concentrates on inflectional morphology and argues that paradigmatic contrast is key for understanding general tendencies in morphology. In particular we look at claims about constraints on paradigm structure and consider approaches that see general tendencies in terms of morphology as a system. Diachronic data is used to illustrate this.

KW - morphology

KW - universals

KW - paradigm structure

KW - entropy

KW - diachrony

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BT - The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Diachronic Linguistics

A2 - Aldridge, Edith

A2 - Breitbarth, Anne

A2 - Kiss, Katalin É.

A2 - Ledgeway, Adam

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A2 - Simonenko, Alexandra

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