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The chapter examines classes of grammatical markers that can serve more than one function, polyfunctional markers, spoiling the one-to-one form and function relation which is what morphology tends to do. There are areas of the grammar more prone to this behaviour suggesting that there may be at work principles of morphological organization that lie orthogonally to sign-based principles such as Transparency. The distributions attested in Tundra Nenets provide a fertile ground for exploration because they combine polyfunctionality with cumulative exponence, where a single paradigm indexes two sets of features. Recasting Blevins’ (2016) abstractive analysis as a default inheritance hierarchy the analysis is guided by insights from Paradigm Function Morphology and Sign Based Construction Grammar, and treats polyfunctionality as the realization of a unifying morphomic feature that abstracts away what is common between different morphosyntactic configurations.

Using the development of the inflection of ‐a‐ adjectives in Old and Middle Indic as a case study, this chapter aims to argue that those phenomena of synchronic syncretism (i.e. inflectional homonymy) that are interpreted in structuralist terms as instances of the Br{\o}ndalian Principle of Compensation are better understood in terms of tendencies concerning the relative frequency of exponents. In particular, according to the interpretation here proposed, syncretism is favoured with paradigm cells that have a low relative frequency, i.e. cells that in inflectional systems making use of cumulative exponence are associated with rare combinations of morphosyntactic properties. This fact, in turn, may be seen as a result of restrictions on the information load of exponents. A general cross-linguistic dispreference for exponents whose relative frequency is significantly lower than the average is hypothesized, and information theoretic quantities based on entropy and redundancy are proposed as heuristic indicators of the degree of compliance with it.

This chapter applies the tools of Relational Morphology, developed in the previous chapters, to a wide range of canonical and noncanonical morphological patterns, primarily in English, German, and Dutch. The phenomena discussed include affixes that occur in only a single word; words with legitimate affixes but nonlexical bases (a.k.a cranberry morphs); idioms; conversions and other zero morphology; linking elements; cumulative exponence; multiple exponence; sister words; sister schemas; blends and truncations; umlaut and other stem allomorphy; infixation and reduplication. In most of these cases, the complications turn out to lie in the interface between morphosyntax and phonology. In addition, many of the phenomena involve the use of sister schemas (also known as second-order schemas) and the same-except relation, which give the grammar great flexibility