Inflectional Paradigms : Content and Form at the Syntax-Morphology Interface

Sometimes dismissed as linguistically epiphenomenal, inflectional paradigms are, in reality, the interface of a language's morphology with its syntax and semantics. Drawing on abundant linguistic evidence, Stump develops a new theoretical framework to explicate the centrality of paradigms in resolving the frequent and varied mismatches between words' form and content.

Sometimes dismissed as linguistically epiphenomenal, inflectional paradigms are, in reality, the interface of a language''s morphology with its syntax and semantics. Drawing on abundant evidence from a wide range of languages (French, Hua, Hungarian, Kashmiri, Latin, Nepali, Noon, Old Norse, Sanskrit, Turkish, Twi and others), Stump examines a variety of mismatches between words'' content and form, including morphomic patterns, defectiveness, overabundance, syncretism, suppletion, deponency and polyfunctionality. He demonstrates that such mismatches motivate a new grammatical architecture in which two kinds of paradigms are distinguished: content paradigms, which determine word forms'' syntactic distribution and semantic interpretation, and form paradigms, which determine their inflectional realization. In this framework, the often nontrivial linkage between a lexeme''s content paradigm and its stems'' form paradigm is the nexus at which incongruities of content and form are resolved. Stump presents clear and precise analyses of a range of morphological phenomena in support of this theoretical innovation.