Syntax and Morphology

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

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) that 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 syntactic function, but sometimes it sends out the wrong signal. Although the problem is as old as the Western linguistic tradition, no generally accepted account of it has yet been given, and it is safe to say that all current theories of language have been constructed as if deponency did not exist. In recent years, however, linguists have begun to confront its theoretical implications, albeit largely in isolation from each other. There is as yet no definitive statement of the problem, nor any generally accepted definition of its nature and scope. This volume brings together the findings of scholars working in the area of morphological mismatches, and represents a typological and theoretical treatment of the topic.