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Chapter 4 evaluates the evidence for Sievers’ Law in the distribution of the Greek primary comparative adjective suffixes *-yos-, *-yon-, *-iyos-, *-iyon-, *-yos-, and *-yon-. This chapter is situated in Part II (Greek Nominal Categories). In order to understand the distribution of semivowels, it is first necessary to explain the s-stem and n-stem variant suffix forms and also the long *and short ∗ivariants. The impact of ablaut alternations is discussed. The evidence of each attested primary comparative adjective in Greek is discussed and set in the context of the history of the formation. Finally, the overall pattern of attestation is evaluated.

This chapter argues that frequency, prosody, and morphology interact in principled ways to yield quantitative asymmetries in the morphosyntactic realization of the English comparative. The typical generalization is that length of the adjective determines whether or not -er is augmented by arguing that usage frequency creates distinct lexical entries for frequent and infrequent adjectives. In accordance with independent facts of differential susceptibility to lenition and phonetic reduction, the chapter argues that the relevant locus of difference lies in prosodic detail. Broadly, the comparative suffix -er is more amenable to attachment to prosodically incomplete adjectives, given its status as a cohering suffix. Under the theoretical principle of comparative grammaticality, whereby a competing way of expressing semantic comparison is available, the degree to which -er attaches to adjectives varies as a function of the prosodic completeness of the adjective, its morphological complexity, and other factors.

This chapter sets out to defend semantic minimalism. Semantic minimalism holds inter alia that there are relatively few context-sensitive expressions (essentially just the obvious cases involving indexicals, demonstratives, etc.) and that the context of utterance has little to no effect on semantic propositions or truth conditions. Against this thesis, opponents have launched two common objections, (1) it entails that comparative adjectives are context insensitive and (2) it renders the role of semantics in communication inexplicable. In response, it is argued that (1) can be accepted and explained through Speech Act Pluralism while (2) is more problematic for the opponents of semantic minimalism as their accounts of communicated content fail certain tests of psychological reality.

In this chapter, I discuss the first graders’ spellings of inflected and derived words. The children in this study often misspelled inflected words (Chapter 2). One type of error that has already been documented is the omission of inflectional endings like the /s/ of books (Chapter 8). This chapter considers the children’s spellings of inflected and derived words in more detail. Before beginning the discussion, some definitions and examples are in order. In English, inflections are added to the ends of words to mark such things as tense and number. For example, helped contains the verb stem help plus the past tense inflectional suffix. I refer to the past tense suffix as -D. Helped contains two morphemes or units of meaning, help and -D. The inflected word books also contains two morphemes, the stem book and the plural suffix -Z. As these examples show, the addition of an inflectional suffix does not change a word’s part of speech. Derivations differ in several ways from inflections. For one thing, English derivational morphemes may be either prefixes or suffixes. One derivational prefix is re-, which may be added to the verb read to form reread. Derivational suffixes include -ion and -ly. Unlike inflections, derivations may change a word’s part of speech. For example, the noun vacation is derived from the verb vacate by the addition of-ion; the adjective facial is derived from the noun face by the addition of -ial. The relation in meaning between a stem and a derived form is often less transparent than the relation in meaning between a stem and an inflected form. For instance, one cannot predict the full meaning of vacation from the meaning of its parts. As discussed in Chapter 1, the spellings of inflected and derived words in English often represent the words’ morphemic forms rather than their phonemic forms. For example, the past tense suffix is /t/ in words like helped, whose stem ends with a voiceless consonant, but /d/ in words like cleaned, whose stem ends with a voiced consonant. The phonemic forms of stems, too, sometimes change when inflectional or derivational morphemes are added.