Defective Paradigms: Missing Forms and What They Tell Us - Couverture rigide

 
9780197264607: Defective Paradigms: Missing Forms and What They Tell Us
Couverture rigide
ISBN 10 : 0197264603 ISBN 13 : 9780197264607
Editeur : Oxford University Press, 2010

Synopsis

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 addressed these issues from a number of analytical approaches - historical, statistical and theoretical - and by using studies from a range of languages.

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À propos de l?auteur

Matthew M. Baerman is a Research Fellow at the University of Surrey.
Greville G. Corbett is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Russian Language, University of Surrey.

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Éditeur
Oxford University Press
Date d'édition
2010
Langue
anglais
ISBN 10 
0197264603
ISBN 13 
9780197264607
Reliure
Relié
Nombre de pages
230
Éditeur
Baerman Matthew, Corbett Greville G., Brown Dunstan
Coordonnées du fabricant
Oxford University Press
https://corp.oup.com/

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