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 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.

Reviews & endorsements

'Inflectional paradigms is an excellent book combining clarity of exposition, rich empirical coverage and theoretical sophistication. … I would like to recommend Stump's new book to all interested in morphological typology and theories of syntax-morphology interface, including not only linguists of a more theoretical stance, but typologists and descriptive linguists as well.' Peter M. Arkadiev, The Linguist List

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Product details

• Date Published: January 2016
• format: Paperback
• isbn: 9781107460850
• length: 239 pages

• dimensions: 228 x 152 x 17 mm
• weight: 0.45kg
• contains: 33 b/w illus. 182 tables
• availability: Available