Abstract
Complementary distribution is a consequence of a general principle of evolutionary biology, competitive exclusion, which further provides a uniform account of both allomorphic variation and the rivalry between affixes in terms of competition for distributional resources. The distribution of inflectional competitors is a type of spatial partitioning, restricted by the morphosyntactic system of a language, while derivational rivals benefit from having to name externally driven concepts. The English suffixes -ce, -cy, and -ntial are analyzed in detail as examples of competition for distribution.
The great Globe it selfe, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolue, And like this insubstantiall Pageant faded Leaue not a racke behind. (Shakespeare, Tempest, (1623) iv. i. 155)
The great bizarrity of Lewis’s career is that he is a white-tie Briton who has made his reputation playing blue-collar Americans. (Lauren Collins. The New Yorker. January 18, 2016, p. 45)
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Notes
- 1.
The fact that individual languages are cultural products is in no way incompatible with the fact that human language depends on innate biological properties, some of which may be specific to homo sapiens.
- 2.
- 3.
More purely linguistically governed alternations were not physiologically based but could still be regarded as automatic.
- 4.
I follow tradition and cite English affixes by their spelling: -ic, -ical. Sometimes it is important to highlight either spelling, for which I use angled brackets (<ic>), or phonology, for which I use slashes (/ɪk/). In later sections, I use X as a wild card followed by letters in Roman to designate any word that ends in a specific string of letters in written English, without commitment to a morphological analysis for the string. Thus, Xft designates the set of all words ending in the letters <ft>. Berg (2016) calls the letter strings at the ends of words word endings.
- 5.
Interestingly, in his survey of the resource partitioning literature, Schoener finds that “Habitat dimensions are important more often than food-type dimensions” (p. 33). Of course, in linguistic systems, it is hard to differentiate the analogues of the two.
- 6.
In many British dialects, even the most prestigious, word-final [t] has succumbed entirely to [ʔ] over the last half-century (Fabricius 2002).
- 7.
Lindner (2016) discusses the use of allo- more fully in his detailed history of linguistic terminology, with examples dating to the end of the nineteenth century.
- 8.
Among the closest of his colleagues at Yale was Morris Swadesh, who had introduced the term complementary distribution not long before.
- 9.
Unlike Saussure and Trubetzkoy, who achieved similarly great posthumous fame, in his lifetime, Whorf never held any academic position, published almost nothing, and was unknown to the academic world outside the small circle of researchers that had gathered around Sapir at Yale in the 1930s.
- 10.
It is not clear how the linguistic and mathematical senses of the terms are related and I have found nothing directly relevant in the work of the Kazan’ linguists themselves.
- 11.
This article was first published in Russian in 1958 in American Contributions to the Fourth International Congress of Slavists. I quote here from the English translation that appeared in the 2004 posthumous collection of Jakobson’s articles on Slavic.
- 12.
The most egregious practitioner of this search for invariance was Theodore Lightner, who incorporated Indo-European sound changes in the synchronic analysis of modern languages. See Lightner (1975) for striking examples.
- 13.
These discovery procedures are often presented as resulting from a radical empiricist or positivist ideology. They are just as easily attributable to the roots of American linguistics in Boasian field work, where the investigator had little access to anything but the acoustic signal.
- 14.
The most audacious breakthroughs of Chomsky’s early work (e.g., Chomsky 1957) came about because he discarded this search for parallelism and analyzed syntax from an entirely different perspective.
- 15.
Later (p. 54), Nida adds “the replacement of /u/ by /iy/” in foot to the list of plural markers and analyzes feet as containing two plural markers, both the replacement and the zero suffix.
- 16.
Presumably on the analogy of analyses from analysis and similar Xis words.
- 17.
An entire industry has grown up around lexical exceptions, which we do not have the space to cover here, though see most recently Yang (2016). The phenomenon is highly problematic for any attempt to subsume all inflectional morphology under allomorphs.
- 18.
Here too there is a large modern literature on these two notions, in terms of forms, rules, and conditions, which we can’t cover in this short article.
- 19.
Only rude Northerners use -es in The Canterbury Tales.
- 20.
The text is from the First Folio of 1623 and is cited from Pyles (1971), p. 217.
- 21.
Compare the plural forms shrimp for the sea creature and shrimps, a derogatory term for small people (a usage that dates to at least Middle English).
- 22.
Purely morphological features like conjugation class are laid over these and lexical properties laid over the morphological features.
- 23.
In that work I remarked on “[a] little-understood restriction against nouns denoting certain abstract concepts (*science V , justice V). (p. 746).” Recently, Olivier Bonami, Olaf Mikkelsen, and Miriam Schulz pointed out to me that the verb science can now be found in the following well-known line from the 2015 film The Martian: “I’m going to have to science the shit out of this.” As Olivier notes, “Next time you write a paper on conversion, keep in mind what can happen on another planet in 35 years!”
- 24.
Thornton (2019) discusses with insight the insistence of linguists that all variation be explained, if not by grammar, then by geo-socio-stylistic conditions. She cites Nancy Dorian’s observation that, in communities with little social stratification, overabundance may be genuine. The rampant variation in the forms of terms for the same concept in Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, a new language within a very small community, provides a nice example (Meir et al. 2010; Sandler et al. 2011).
- 25.
Thornton (2019) describes other forms of overabundance, such as the availability of alternate stems and double marking.
- 26.
Most linguists treat the two spellings as orthographic variants (Marchand 1969).
- 27.
The only examples of nouns of the form Xntity in OED Online are cantity, entity, identity, nonentity, overquantity, quantity, scantity, tantity, of which only entity and its derivatives contain a full syllable before the suffix, and all of which are borrowed.
- 28.
3.3%, compared to 32% for -ncy and 63% for -nce.
- 29.
<-ce> is especially interesting. Phonologically, it is /s/, with the silent letter <e> serving only to ‘soften’ the letter <c>. <-cy> contains the same /s/ followed by final /i/, which is normally spelled <y>. In English, the sequence /nt + s/ is homophonous with /ns/: compare sense and cents.
- 30.
The small size of the environment may explain why most researchers, present company included, have not noticed it, but Marchand did, as Franz Rainer points out to me: “Formative restrictions [on –ness (MA)] exist in so far as adjectives in -ate, -ant, -ent chiefly derive substantives in -acy, -ancy, -ency.” (Marchand 1969, p. 335).
- 31.
- 32.
There are barely 100 words in total of the rival denominal adjective forms Xntory, Xntist, and Xntive in OED.
- 33.
When the final vowel is stressed (e.g., circumstance), Xantial is possible (circumstantial), but almost all the words of this form in OED (14/18) are based on nouns of the form Xstance and these comprise a distinct neighborhood.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to the many people who have helped with this article, especially to the organizers of the 2016 Vienna IMM 2017 meeting, who so kindly invited me to speak about competition. Thanks for comments to Stephen Anderson, Kristian Berg, Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, Greville Corbett, Franz Rainer, and especially to Anna Thornton, who has taught me a great deal. Thanks also to the students who provided feedback on an earlier version. The analysis of the absence of Xantial words in English was sparked by a discussion with Peter Aronoff of the technical term performant, which, he pointed out, should be performantial. We now know why it is not.
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Aronoff, M. (2019). Competitors and Alternants in Linguistic Morphology. In: Rainer, F., Gardani, F., Dressler, W., Luschützky, H. (eds) Competition in Inflection and Word-Formation . Studies in Morphology, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02550-2_2
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