Defective Paradigms: Missing Forms and What They Tell Us
Matthew Baerman, Greville G. Corbett, and Dunstan Brown
Abstract
An important design feature of language is the use of productive patterns in inflection. In English, we have pairs such as ‘enjoy’ — ‘enjoyed’, ‘agree’ — ‘agreed’, and many others. On the basis of this productive pattern, if we meet a new verb ‘transduce’ we know that there will be the form ‘transduced’. Even if the pattern is not fully regular, there will be a form available, as in ‘understand’ — ‘understood’. Surprisingly, this principle is sometimes violated, a phenomenon known as defectiveness, which means there is a gap in a word's set of forms: for example, given the verb ‘forego’, many ... More
An important design feature of language is the use of productive patterns in inflection. In English, we have pairs such as ‘enjoy’ — ‘enjoyed’, ‘agree’ — ‘agreed’, and many others. On the basis of this productive pattern, if we meet a new verb ‘transduce’ we know that there will be the form ‘transduced’. Even if the pattern is not fully regular, there will be a form available, as in ‘understand’ — ‘understood’. Surprisingly, this principle is sometimes violated, a phenomenon known as defectiveness, which means there is a gap in a word's set of forms: for example, given the verb ‘forego’, many if not most people are unwilling to produce a past tense. Although such gaps have been known to us since the days of Classical grammarians, they remain poorly understood. Defectiveness contradicts basic assumptions about the way inflectional rules operate, because it seems to require that speakers know that for certain words, not only should one not employ the expected rule, one should not employ any rule at all. This is a serious problem, since it is probably safe to say that all reigning models of grammar were designed as if defectiveness did not exist, and would lose a considerable amount of their elegance if it were properly factored in. This volume addresses these issues from a number of analytical approaches — historical, statistical and theoretical — and by using studies from a range of languages.
Keywords:
language,
productive patterns,
inflectional rules,
English,
defectiveness,
Classical grammarians,
grammatical models,
historical approach,
statistical approach,
theoretical approach
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2010 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780197264607 |
| Published to British Academy Scholarship Online: January 2012 |
DOI:10.5871/bacad/9780197264607.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Matthew Baerman, editor
Research Fellow, University of Surrey
Greville G. Corbett, editor
Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Russian Language, University of Surrey; Fellow of the British Academy
Dunstan Brown, editor
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, University of Surrey
More
Less
