Abstract
In the preceding paper, Evans, Brown and Corbett (henceforth: EBC) presented the complex system of pronominal prefixation in Dalabon. They proposed an analysis that describes this system by a number of statements associated with the nodes of a Network Morphology. Some of these statements have the formal nature of referrals (Zwicky 1985, Stump 1993): certain category combinations are realized by the morphological exponent of other combinations. I find the notion of referral problematic for theoretical reasons (because it is too powerful a device), but especially in the context of language acquisition; it requires the child who tries to identify morphemes as the exponents of some category combinations to look also at other category combinations. It would be easier for the child to analyze word forms into minimal contrastive elements that bear information themselves. In the end, the child may have identified certain morphemes to be underspecified, covering more than one category combination, or more than one cell of a paradigm (Wunderlich 1996a, Noyer 1998).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Anderson, Stephen R. (1992) A-morphous morphology. Cambridge University Press. Bickel, Balthasar, Walter Bisang, and Yogendra P. Yadava (1999) Face vs. empathy: the social foundation of Maithili verb agreement. Linguistics 37, 481–518.
Blevins, James P. (2000) Markedness and blocking in German declensional paradigms. In Barbara Stiebels and Dieter Wunderlich (eds.) Lexicon in Focus, 83–103. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Blutner, Reinhard (1999) Some aspects of optimality in natural language interpretation. Ms. Humboldt University Berlin.
Bonet, Eulàlia (1991) Morphology after syntax: Pronominal clitics in Romance languages. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.
Brown, Dunstan (forthcoming) Declension and conjugation. In: D. Alan Cruse et al. (eds.) Lexicology: An International Handbook on the Nature and Structure of Words and Vocabularies. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson (1978) Universals in language use: politeness phenomena. In E. Goody (ed.) Questions and politeness: strategies in social interaction, 56–311. Cambridge University Press.
Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew (1988) Comments on the paper by Noyer. In Steven G. Lapointe, Diane K. Brentari and Patrick M. Farrell (eds.) Morphology and its relation to phonology and syntax, 286–301. CSLI Publications. 252 Dieter Wunderlich
Curnow, Timothy Jowan (1998) Maung verbal agreement revisited: a response to Donohue (1993). Australian Journal of Linguistics 19, 141–60.
Donohue, Mark (1998) A note on verbal agreement in Maung. Australian Journal of Linguistics 13, 73–89.
Evans, Nicholas, Dunstan Brown, and Greville Corbett (2000) Dalabon pronominal pre-fixes and the typology of syncretism: a Network Morphology analysis. This volume.
Gerlach, Birgit (1998) Optimale Klitiksequenzen. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 17, 35–91.
Halle, Morris, and Alec Marantz (1993) Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. In Kenneth Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser (eds) The view from building 20, 111–76. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT press.
Heath, Jeffrey (1998) Pragmatic skewing in 1–2 pronominal combinations in native American languages. JAL 64: 83–104.
Inkelas, Sharon (1994) The consequences of optimization for underspecification. NETS 25, 287–302.
Jäger, Gerhard (1999) Optimal syntax and optimal semantics. Paper presented at the DIP Colloquium. University of Amsterdam.
Lakämper, Renate, and Dieter Wunderlich (1998) Person marking in Quechua–A constraint-based minimalist analysis. Lingua 105, 113–48.
McCarthy, John J., and Alan S. Prince (1995) Faithfulness and reduplicative identity. University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 18, 249–384.
Noyer, Rolf (1998) Impoverishment theory and morphosyntactic markedness. In Steven G. Lapointe, Diane K. Brentari and Patrick M. Farrell (eds.) Morphology and its relation to phonology and syntax, 264–85. CSLI Publications.
Steele, Susan (1995) Towards a theory of morphological information. Language 71, 260–309.
Stiebels, Barbara (2000) Linker inventories, Linking splits and lexical economy. In Barbara Stiebels and Dieter Wunderlich (eds) Lexicon in Focus. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 211–245.
Stump, Gregory (1993) On rules of referral. Language 69, 449–479.
Wunderlich, Dieter (1996a) Minimalist morphology: the role of paradigms. In Geert Booij and Jaap van Marie (eds.) Yearbook of f Morphology 1995. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 93–114.
Wunderlich, Dieter (1996b) A minimalist model of inflectional morphology. In Chris Wilder, Hans-Martin Gärtner and Manfred Bierwisch (eds.) The Role of Economy Principles in LinguisticTheory, 267–98. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Wunderlich, Dieter (1997) Cause and the structure of verbs. Linguistic Inquiry 28: 27–68.
Wunderlich (2000) How gaps and substitutions can become optimal: the pronominal affix paradigms of Yimas. To appear in Transactions of the Philological Society, special issue on lexical paradigms, ed. James P. Blevins.
Zwicky, Arnold (1985) How to describe inflection. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 11, 372–86.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2001 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wunderlich, D. (2001). A correspondence-theoretic analysis of Dalabon transitive paradigms. In: Booij, G., Van Marle, J. (eds) Yearbook of Morphology 2000. Yearbook of Morphology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3724-1_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3724-1_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5738-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-3724-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive