CRITERIOS DE EVALUACIÓN DE LA MATERIA

The distinction made above between derivational and inflectional affixes supports a further crosslinguistic generalization, this having to do with parameter (c) SEPARATIST VS. CUMULATIVE AFFIXES: whether affixes have only one meaning or whether they jointly stand for more than one bit of semantics. Some semantic types of affixes have a greater tendency to cumulate – that is, to be expressed by a single affix – than others. Here are two generalizations proposed by Frans Plank ( 1999 ), one about a pref-erence for separatist expression and the other about a preference for cumulation.

GEN-4: Derivational and inflectional affixes do not have jointly cumulative exponents. (Plank 1999 : 290–292)

GEN-5: Person and number are frequently signaled by cumulative, rather than separatist, affixes. (Plank 1999 : 292)

GEN-4 underscores the difference between derivational and inflectional affixes. What it means is that there are no languages where the word for speaker would look like it does in English: a stem and a derivational affix, but where the plural form would be speak-lut , where the affix - lut combines both the deverbal nominalizer ‘-er’ and the plural ‘-s’.

The force of GEN-5 may be illustrated on Latin and Turkish. As we saw ear-lier (example (8)), the nominal paradigms of these two languages differ in that Latin cumulates number and case (e.g. dom- os ‘houses ACC,’ where - os indicates both plurality and the accusative case), while Turkish has a separate plural affix (- lar /- ler ) and a separate accusative suffix - i ( ev- ler - i ‘houses ACC’).

Now compare their verbal paradigms for the past tense of the verb ‘go’:

(28) LATIN TURKISH

S1 ambula-ba- m git-ti-m S2 ambula-ba- s git-ti- n

S3 ambula-ba- t git-ti- 0 P1 ambula-ba- mus git-ti-k P2 ambula-ba- tis git-ti- niz P3 ambula-ba- nt git-ti- ler

While past tense is signaled by a separatist suffix in both languages: - ba in Latin and - ti in Turkish, neither language separates person and number:

the two categories cumulate in joint affixes. This is in spite of the fact that Turkish is generally agglutinating – that is, it has separatist affixes. Plank notes that the very common joint expression of person and number may be due to the fact that the normal sense of additive plurality does not apply to the first and second person: as discussed in Section 2.3.2 of Chapter 2 , what ‘we’ generally refers to is not more than one ‘I,’ and the plural ‘you’ is also not necessarily more than one listener.

Let us now turn to the third issue, that of MONOSEMOUS VS.

POLYSEMOUS AFFIX EXPONENTS ((c)) . Consider the formal distinctions of the German definite article paradigm.

(29) SINGULAR PLURAL German

MASC FEM NEUT MASC FEM NEUT

NOM der die das die die die ACC den die das die die die GEN des der des der der der DAT dem der dem den den den

There are 24 slots defined by the two numbers, three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and four cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative);

yet, there are only one-fourth as many distinct forms: der , die , das , den , des , and dem . With the exception of des , all of these forms are multiply employed: they have alternative meanings. Note that each gender, number, and case distinction is formally differentiated in some portion of the chart but no gender, number, and case distinction is formally differ-entiated in every sub-paradigm. For example, masculine and neuter are differentiated in the singular nominative and accusative but not in the genitive and dative; and genitive and dative are distinct in the singular for masculine and neuter but not for feminine.

Are these multiple uses of the same forms coincidental or do they occur for a reason? This question arises every time a form is found to have alternative meanings: are these forms instances of polysemy or homonymy? The former term applies where the meanings are related, the latter, if the identity of the forms is coincidental. The English word bear has two meanings: the animal and the verb to mean ‘to carry.’ This is accidental – an instance of homonymy. The word school also has mul-tiple meanings: it can refer to a building of an educational institution or it can refer to the institution itself. Here the two meanings are clearly related; the word is polysemous rather than homonymous. Is the rela-tionship between the multiple meanings of the five German article forms like those between the meanings of bear or like those between the meanings of school ?

Some of the identical forms seem random, more like bear standing for two different meanings. Why should the singular masculine accusative form den also be the plural dative? Or why should the singular masculine nominative der also serve as the singular feminine dative as well as the plural genitive? These may be accidental coincidences – i.e. homonymies.

However, there are also some one-form-more-than-one-meaning patterns in this paradigm that seem less capricious in that they have crosslinguis-tic parallels. We will discuss two of these.

(30) (a) GENDER POLYSEMY IN ALL PLURAL FORMS

The plural case forms die , der , and den are the same for all three genders even though they have partially different forms in the singular .

(b) CASE POLYSEMY OF NOMINATIVE AND ACCUSATIVE IN FIVE OF THE SIX SUB-PARADIGMS

The nominative and the accusative have the same form in the singular feminine ( die ) and in the singular neuter ( das ) as well as in the plural ( die ); the two cases are differentiated only in the singular masculine ( der and den ).

The lack of distinctions within a category, such as gender or case, in certain contexts while they are present in other contexts is known as syn-cretism (cf. Baerman, Brown and Corbett 2005 : 34). It is important to pay attention to the proviso that the distinction should show up in some other context in the same language. For example, the lack of gender dis-tinctions in Finnish nouns does not meet the definition of syncretism since grammatical gender distinctions are not made anywhere in the lan-guage. Syncretism is thus an instance of paradigmatic asymmetry in the expressions of certain meanings.

Let us take a closer look at the statements in (30). (30a) describes gender syncretism in German. We saw this pattern in the case of per-sonal pronouns in Chapter 2 , Section 2.3.2: in Russian, the third person singular pronoun has three genders ( on , ona , and ono ) but in the plural, there is no gender distinction ( oni ). Russian also provides another exam-ple of gender syncretism. Singular nouns and their adjectives are case-marked differently depending on gender. In the plural, however, gender distinctions are absent for the noun except for the genitive case and they are completely lacking for the adjective. This is shown in (31). The mascu-line paradigm is for the phrase ‘first class’; the feminine paradigm is of

‘first school.’

(31) (a) SINGULAR Russian

MASCULINE FEMININE

NOM perv-yj klass-0 perv-aja škol-a ACC perv-yj klass-0 perv-uju škol-u GEN perv-ovo klass-a perv-oj škol-y DAT perv-omu klass-u perv-oj škol-e INSTR perv-ym klass-om perv-oj škol-oj PREP perv-om klass-e perv-oj škol-e

(b) PLURAL

MASCULINE FEMININE

NOM perv- y e klass - y perv- ye škol- y ACC perv- ye klass - y perv- ye škol- y GEN perv- yh klass-ov perv- yh škol-0 DAT perv- ym klass- am perv- ym škol- am INSTR perv - ymi klass- ami perv- ymi škol- ami PREP perv- yh klass- ah perv- yh škol- ah

Gender syncretism in the plural seems to have a plausible rationale: while singular referents have clearly identifiable genders, multitudes of things may include members that differ in gender. Nonetheless, gender syncret-ism in the plural is not a universal pattern. In Plank and Schellinger’s sam-ple of over 300 languages, it was a frequent pattern but about 10% of the languages violated it by having more gender distinctions in non- singular numbers than in the singular (Plank and Schellinger 1997 ). Their results are nonetheless still consistent with the following frequency statement:

GEN-6: Crosslinguistically, gender syncretism in the plural is more frequent than in the singular.

(30b) states an instance of case syncretism in the German article para-digm involving the polysemy of nominative-accusative case markers in five of the six sub- paradigms given in (29). Note that the Russian examples in (31) also show the same case syncretism in the plural of both masculine and feminine nouns and in the masculine singular. The syncretism of the two so-called core cases – nominative and accusative, or ergative and abso-lutive – has been found to be the most common pattern of case syncretism (Baerman et al. 2005 ).

GEN-7: Crosslinguistically, case syncretism most frequently involves the two core cases.

The question addressed in this section was this: given that we want to construct a word in a language, what are crosslinguistic constraints on the combination of morphemes available for this purpose? In response, seven crosslinguistic generalizations have been discussed. The first two were about a special type of compounding – incorporation – stating the prefer-ence for incorporating objects over intransitive subjects and intransitive subjects over transitive subjects (GEN-1) and the rarity of agent incorpora-tion (GEN-2). The other five generalizaincorpora-tions pertain to affixes: the implica-tional relation between derivation and inflection (GEN-3), the lack of joint cumulation of derivational and inflectional affixes (GEN-4), the frequency of person-number cumulation (GEN-5), the preference for gender syncre-tism in the plural (GEN-6), and for case syncresyncre-tism of core cases (GEN-7).

As was seen in Section 4.1, the correct choice of morphemes does not yet guarantee the well-formedness of words: some morphemes have alter-native forms and given a particular context, the right variant needs to be chosen. The question we are turning to next is this: what are crosslinguis-tically valid patterns of morpheme variance?