Matthew Baerman

University of Surrey

Krongo, a member of the Kadu family (Nuba Mountains, Sudan), has four agreement classes: feminine, masculine, neuter and plural (Reh 1985). Nominal number-marking prefixes play a key role in class assignment: productive plural prefixes trigger plural agreement, and productive singular prefixes trigger neuter agreement. In most other Kadu languages...

Nouns in Nuer (Western Nilotic) nouns have been presented as an extreme example of inflectional complexity, where a 'chaotic' distribution of suffixes combines with dozens of different stem modifications to yield dozens of inflection classes, (Frank 1999, Baerman 2012). We show that all of the apparent surface variety can be reduced a handful of op...

As an enterprise, linguistic typology is perhaps best understood in terms of the shared ideology of its practitioners. In studying contact‐induced change typologists can begin to understand which features of language are readily acquired or arise through contact. This chapter focuses on recent developments in research on language contact in relatio...

Subject agreement in the North Omotic language Benchnon (Rapold 2006) lacks dedicated person marking, but indirectly indicates person distinctions through asymmetries in the distribution of gender markers. In one verbal paradigm, first and second person subjects are expressed by feminine morphology, and in the other paradigm they are expressed by m...

It is not uncommon for inflected nominal forms to be incorporated into verbal paradigms, as in Imonda progressive construction tōbtō soh-ia ale-f 'he is looking for fish (lit. fish search-LOC stay-PRS)', where the verbal noun 'search' is in the locative case. Equally, nominal inflection classes are not uncommon. But the two rarely cooccur. We prese...

Inflectional morphology plays a paradoxical role in language. On the one hand it tells us useful things, for example that a noun is plural or a verb is in the past tense. On the other hand many languages get along perfectly well without it, so the baroquely ornamented forms we sometimes find come across as a gratuitous over-elaboration. This is esp...

The verbal suffixes of Seri (a language isolate of Sonora, Mexico) divide the lexicon into classes of unparalleled complexity. The paradigm has only four forms, which mark subject number and aspect (or event number), yet there are over 250 distinct types in a corpus of just under 1,000 verbs. This relation of forms to types means that by informatio...

Language is a complex thing, otherwise we as humans would not devote so much of our resources to learning it, either the first time around or on later attempts. And of the many ways languages have of being complex, perhaps none is so daunting as what can be achieved by inflectional morphology. Indeed, a mere mention of the 1,000,000-form verb parad...

Kin terms in some languages have suppletive roots according to the person of the possessor, as in Kaluli na:la: 'my daughter', ga:la: 'your daughter' versus ida: 'her/his daughter'. Suppletion is generally seen as a language-specific morphological peculiarity, but in this context there are a number of lexical and morphological similarities across l...

To appear in Cahiers de Grammaire

Current thinking on inflection classes views them as organized networks rather than random assemblages of allomorphs (a view that reaches back to the 1980s, with such notions as Wurzel's paradigm structure conditions and Carstairs's paradigm economy). But we still find systems which appear to lack any visible implicative structure. A particularly s...

The case-number suffixes of the Western Nilotic language Nuer (Frank 1999) display a remarkable combination of formal simplicity and distributional complexity, which is manifested in: (i) a seemingly erratic form-function mapping that precludes attributing a consistent meaning to the suffixes, and (ii) a wealth of inflection classes only barely dif...

In a canonical inflectional paradigm, inflectional affixes mark distinctions in morphosyntactic value, while the lexical stem remains invariant. But stems are known to alternate too, constituting a system of inflectional marking operating according to parameters which typically differ from those of the affixal system, and so represent a distinct ob...

This chapter discusses the morphological typology of deponency. It shows that the theoretical interest of deponent verbs in Latin is clear, and that morphological forms are not simply a blind reflection of the categories they represent. A mismatch between form and function is discussed, and the active and passive voices in Latin deponents are studi...

A defective word is defined by paradigm as incomplete compared with the major class it belongs to. Defectiveness signifies the unwanted intrusion of morphological idiosyncrasy into syntax. Although this phenomenon has been a constant subject of studies, it has been ill incorporated into the theories of language. This present volume brings together...

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, th...

Case syncretism refers to the combination of multiple distinct case values in a single form. Distinct case values are determined on a language-specific basis, so that case syncretism by this definition involves an observable asymmetry between paradigms within a language. In the most obvious pattern, multiple case forms in one paradigm correspond to...

The idea that certain morphological and phonological irregularities are due to speakers' desire to avoid homophony is widely invoked, yet has also come under strong criticism as an explanation which is neither necessary nor sufficient. In most cases there is no way to resolve the question, since the assumption that something is being avoided is its...

We present a corpus-based study of variation in case assignment of the direct object of negated verbs in Russian over the past 200years. Superficially the system of case forms available over this relatively short period has remained largely the same, but the way in which certain cases are used has been radically altered. This is particularly appare...

It is well known that nouns in predicate position with the copular быть / byt´ ‘to be’ in Russian may take either the nominative or the instrumental case. The commonly held view is that predicate nouns with more specified temporal, referential or evidential properties favour the instrumental (Potebnja 1958; Ovsjaniko-Kulikovskij 1912; Patokova 1929...

В русском языке глаголы, у которых в непрошедших временах отсутствует форма первого лица ед. ч. (типа убедить), представляют собой известную морфологическую проблему дефектных парадигм. Если на синхронном уровне дефектность можно трактовать как часть лексической информации глагола, вопрос истории возникновения неполных парадигм остается открытым. В...

В статье рассматривается изменение в падежном маркировании предикативных существительных со связочным глаголом быть в русском языке девятнадцатого и двадцатого веков. Известно, что такие существительные могут иметь форму как именительного, так и творительного падежа. Проанализировав различную частотность альтернативных форм в текстах, написанных ме...

Deponency is a mismatch between form and function in language that was first described for Latin, where there is a group of verbs (the deponents) which are morphologically passive but syntactically active. This is evidence of a larger problem involving the interface between syntax and morphology: inflectional morphology is supposed to specify synta...

Syncretism occurs where two or more distinct morphosyntactic values are collapsed in a single inflected word form. In the current literature, instances of syncretism are being increasingly cited to support particular models of morphology and feature structure. This article takes a critical look at the sorts of analyses that the data actually warran...

The term morphological reversal describes the situation where the members of a morphological opposition switch their functions in some context (as with Hebrew gender marking, where -Ø~-a marks masculine~feminine with adjectives but feminine~masculine with numerals). There is a long tradition of polemic against the notion that morphology can encode...

Typology in its modern form is connected with the search for universals. This works to the advantage of certain types of questions, those which allow a more or less coherent answer for any language. Phonology, syntax, and semantics are usually the starting point, and such topics as phonological inventories, word order, and the range of expressible...

Morphological features characterize variations in morphological form which are independent of syntactic context. They contrast with morphosyntactic features, which characterize variations in form correlated with different syntactic contexts. Morphological features account for formal variation across lexemes (inflectional class), as well as morphosy...

Syncretism - where a single form serves two or more morphosyntactic functions - is a persistent problem at the syntax-morphology interface. It results from a 'mismatch', whereby the syntax of a language makes a particular distinction, but the morphology does not. This pioneering book provides the first full-length study of inflectional syncretism,...

Syncretism, where a single form corresponds to multiple morphosyntactic functions, is pervasive in languages with inflectional morphology. Its interpretation highlights the contrast between different views of the status of morphology. For some, morphology lacks independent structure, and syncretism reflects the internal structure of morphosyntactic...

The Surrey Syncretism Database encodes information on inflectional syncretism in 30 genetically and geographically diverse languages, representing such morphosyntactic features as case, person, number and gender. Syncretism is defined as when some set of words fail to distinguish morphosyntactic feature values which we believe, based on language-in...

Without Abstract

The distribution of the yes/no-interrogative clitic li in Macedonian and Bulgarian reveals a complex interaction of syntax with non-syntactic factors. The underlying syntactic uniformity of questions with li in the two languages is obscured by a series of prosodic idiosyncracies in one language or the other. In Macedonian, the major prosodic phenom...

Macedonian dialects display a number of different accentual systems, ranging from free lexical stress (with possible secondary stress) to a penultimate-antepenultimate stress window and to various fixed stress systems: antepenultimate, penultimate and initial. Dialect geography suggests a model for their historical development. The gradual restrict...

1. Introduction: what is morphological complexity? The paper is a prospectus for a European Research Council funded project 1 (Corbett, Baerman and Brown), which aims to chart the limits of linguistic complexity by focusing on inflectional morphology. Quite apart from its inherent interest to linguists, we believe that it may present particular cha...

The databases record instances of deponency, which is the term we have adopted to describe mismatches between morphology and morphosyntax. The prototypical example are the deponent verbs of Latin, which involve a mismatch between passive form and active meaning. That is, a normal Latin verb had active forms such as amō 'I love' and amāvī 'I have lo...

The database covers 111 languages, and concentrates on person syncretism. It documents instances where particular person and number combinations share the same form (for example, the English verb 'to be' where one form is used with you (sg), we, you (pl) and they: you are, we are, you are, they are). The database also records properties which might...