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This introductory chapter provides essential background for the analyses developed in the subsequent chapters of the book. The first section defines the scope of the book, introducing the types of prosodic morphemes to be discussed (reduplication, word minimality, templatic morphology, hypocoristics). The next two sections discuss how prosodic morphology has been of interest to recent theories of phonology and morphology. In phonology, prosodic morphology illustrates theories of segmental and prosodic shape markedness. In morphology, prosodic morphology challenges the Item-and-Arrangement approach that is most easily modeled in constituency trees. The final sections present a critical overview of recent work on prosodic morphology within Optimality Theory and outline the new theory developed in the book.

Some constructions are claimed to be universal, including the passive and the inverse voice constructions. In fact, the syntactic properties used to define passive and inverse constructions, and contrast them with active/direct constructions, do not coincide across languages. This chapter surveys the great diversity of voice constructions across languages to demonstrate that there is no universal structural definition of passive and inverse constructions. Instead, one must construct a syntactic space to represent the continuum of structural properties of voice constructions across languages. But this continuum is constrained, both in terms of the structural properties of the voice construction and the function of the construction. The more salient/topical participant will be coded with the typologically less marked, more subject-like structural properties, and the less salient participant will be coded with less subject-like properties. The continuum is also reinforced by the fact that constructions shift across the syntactic space via grammaticalization.

This chapter describes how natural coordination is expressed in co-compounds and phrase-like tight coordination. Different types of markedness are discussed, including formal, distinctive, structural, local, typological, and textual markedness. Marking strategies for natural coordination can deviate in several respects from ordinary coordination, all of which can be accounted for by two conflicting relationships of iconicity: minimal distance and symmetry. The phenomena of phonological-syntactic non-isomorphism in the syntax of coordination are discussed, putting them into a broader context of similar phenomena in related domains of syntax, such as clitics, phrasal affixes, and group inflection.

This chapter investigates the diachronic evolution of co-compounds as formal patterns and lexical classes. It is argued that in grammaticalization studies, it is important to distinguish between the evolution of markers or constructions and the evolution of classes. In the former perspective, co-compounds develop from a condensation of coordination (condensation hypothesis); in the latter, co-compounds evolve gradually as a lexical class by an increase of their token and type frequencies. The chapter further explores the role of textual markedness in the evolution of co-compounds and in their areal diffusion, and considers how the evolution of co-compounds is favoured in particular registers, such as folk poetry, by processes of desemantization. The accumulation of co-compounds in folk poetry is addressed from the perspective of grammaticalization.

This chapter focuses on social factors promoting bilingualism, and ultimately, language contact phenomena. The costs and rewards of bilingualism (e.g., language as political capital and bilingualism's social and economic advantages) are surveyed. The social motivations to engage in codeswitching, as a rational choice, are discussed within the framework of a Markedness Model. Language shift (replacement of an L1) is discussed.

This chapter shows that violation profiles can be employed to predict contrasts among expressions in empirical investigations, and that markedness is the grammar-internal correlate of (some) phenomena of gradedness that is experienced in empirical studies. In contrast to other empirically oriented work within optimality theory (OT), this chapter claims that a standard OT grammar is already fitted for showing gradedness. It then talks about gradedness and categoricity within the tradition of generative grammar, especially in its relevance for the competence/performance distinction. It introduces a particular case of syntactic markedness — case conflicts in argument free relative constructions. It presents data from an experimental study and demonstrates how an OT grammar inferred in the way described in this chapter can predict the observed gradient data.

The previous chapter defined the principle of Minimize Forms and formulated some form minimization predictions. This chapter is organized as follows. Section 4.1 illustrates and tests these predictions using some of Greenberg’s (1966) markedness hierarchies. Section 4.2 tests the same hierarchies on diachronic data from an evolving language family (Germanic). Section 4.3 considers ‘grammaticalization’ phenomena in relation to MiF and processing. Section 4.4 illustrates the general points made about grammaticalization with a brief case study involving definiteness marking. Section 4.5 considers how forms can be minimized on the basis of processing enrichments through structural parallelism, continuing the general discussion of processing enrichment that was initiated in Section 3.2.3. Section 4.6 considers enrichments made on the basis of dependency assignments. This leads to a discussion of the constituent-command constraint on many dependencies and to a general principle of Conventionalized Dependency.

This book discusses copulas and their function, their morphosyntactic properties, their syntagmatic properties such as their compatibility with different parts of speech, their historical origin, and their distribution in discourse. Copulas are thought to be meaningless, that is, ‘semantically empty’. This leads to one of the central questions the present study is concerned with: if the existence of copulas cannot be accounted for in terms of meaning, how can it be accounted for? Usually, the existence of linguistic items of whatever kind can be motivated through the meanings they carry. Moreover, the fact that copulas are lacking entirely in certain languages, such as Tagalog, indicates that languages can operate effectively without copulas. This book covers the following topics about copulas: copulas in cross-linguistic perspective, copularization and lexical semantics, the multi-factor model of copularization, parts of speech, nouns, verbs, adjectives, markedness, time-stability, and lexical class formation.

The point of departure for this book on copularization had been the discovery of a prospective language universal, that is the scale NOMINALS > ADJECTIVALS > VERBALS, which translates the existing distributional patterns of copularizing vs. non-copularizing lexemes into a compact formula. In the extant literature on the pails-of-speech issue, this scale has been proposed repeatedly as it can be used to describe certain aspects of the morphosyntactic properties of lexical items at the universal level. This scale also lends itself to a general characterization in terms of the semantic parameter of time-stability. The possibility of explaining the behavior of copulas by means of a model that redefines the semantic macro-classes of nominals, verbals, and adjectivals in terms of the more profound semantic dimension of time-stability is taken into consideration. This book also considers markedness as a key factor in the copula paradox and a new approach to the issue regarding parts of speech.

This chapter describes an architecture for phonological theory that reconciles the “conventional” and “natural” aspects of phonology by combining a substantive notion of markedness. The goal is to solve the “paradox” associated with attempts to define what constitutes a “possible phonological rule in a natural language.” The chapter considers the markedness module, a component of the proposed architecture containing all the interface properties between the phonology and the sensorimotor processes external to the phonology proper. It also discusses the notion of REPAIR and its interaction with markedness statements, along with the French hiatus resolution, Bulgarian liquid metathesis and syllable structure, the synchronic grammar of Polish, correlation statements, natural rules, context-free changes, visibility theory and spotlighting, and derivations. The chapter concludes with some speculations on historical change.

A language must be learnable by new generations of speakers. Contributing to the learnability of language and its semantic and syntactic categories are the skewed frequencies of its elements. Categories whose members are equally frequent would be unlearnable in principle.

‘A Minimalist Program for Phonology’ defines the computational system commonly known as phonology, and establishes methodology. It provides an introduction to linguistic minimalism and discusses the implications for phonology that stem from the Minimalist Program and the Galilean approach to phonology, as well as a discussion of markedness and the relationship between diachronic and synchronic phonological explanation.

Words and segments are both categorized in terms of unary features, divided into primary features, determining the basic distribution, and secondary features, substantively appropriate to the primary on which they are dependent. Sonority in phonology has a syntactic analogy in the form of ‘nouniness’. The substantively opposed categorization of nouns and verbs and consonants and vowels is reflected to in the divergent distributions of the two members of each pair. This underlies the inappropriateness of the X-bar hypothesis either in syntax or phonology, now spelled out more explicitly. The greater complexity of categorization in syntax is illustrated, involving derivational relations incompatible with the substance of phonology. The analogical categorizations of syntax and phonology correlate with the expression of natural classes and markedness properties.

Catalan verb morphology displays a curious and complex morphome that is not morpho‐syntactically motivated. The set of categories represented consists of (a) and (b): (a) 1st singular present indicative, present subjunctive; (b) Past perfective indicative (synthetic), past subjunctive, past participle. The morphome is generally marked by a velar consonant: /k/ after a sibilant, /g/ elsewhere. I explore the spread in individual verbs of the velar marker from submorphome (a) to sub‐morphome (b) or from (b) to (a), and from the original verbs to others, in a corpus of inflections from 1200–1550. I attempt to identify morphological, phonological, and possibly semantic, motivations for the observed spread of the morphome from 22% of e‐conjugation verb roots showing any stem alternation in 1300 to 78% in the present day.

Polarity, a type of syncretism, is decomposed into diagonal syncretism (one feature marked, the other feature unmarked, i.e. +F,-G and -F,+G expressed by the same form) and full reversal (two features either both marked or both unmarked). Diagontal syncretism is found in various inflectional systems and can be regarded as a phenomenon of second order natural classes, defined in markedness degrees. In contrast, full reversal should not exist because it would be hard to learn that a certain form expresses either –F,-G or +F,+G. However, several authors claimed the existence of morphological polarity (full reversal). The more detailed investigation reveals the possibility of inflectional class polarity (the exponents of +F vs. –F in one class of items are reversed in another class of items), either for semantic reasons: a certain affix might negate inherent number, or for phonological reasons: an ablaut vowel should be distinct from the underlying vowel. Polarity is also possible as the last resort for expressing contrast in a degenerate paradigm (Old French declension).

This chapter proposes a reconceptualization of the principles-and-parameters approach to comparative syntax, retaining its strengths and attempting to deal with its perceived weaknesses. The central idea is to organize the parameters of universal grammar into hierarchies, which define the ways in which properties of individually variant categories may act in concert. This creates macroparametric effects from the combined action of many microparameters. The highest position in a hierarchy defines a macroparameter, a major typological property; lower positions define successively more local properties. Parameter setting in language acquisition starts at the highest position as this is the simplest choice; acquirers will 'move down the hierarchy' when confronted with primary linguistic data incompatible with a high setting. Hence, the hierarchies simultaneously define learning paths and typological properties.

Many languages of the world have a gender system in their grammar. There are two genders in French, three in German, four in Dyirbal (from North Queensland), more elsewhere. We seldom find an exact correspondence between masculine/feminine and male/female sex. In German most nouns referring to females are feminine but Mädchen ‘girl’ is in neuter gender (because it contains the diminutive suffix -chen which is always neuter). Gender choice (or assignment) can be more or less semantically transparent or opaque. There is always some semantic basis to Linguistic Gender choice but languages vary as to how much semantic choice there is. Gender assignment can also involve morphological and phonological features of nouns. Gender may be distinguished in personal pronouns only, as in English, or through derivational affixes (as in many Uralic languages). This chapter focuses on a cross-linguistic typology of gender, its meanings, and its expression.

This chapter explores the options of using the opposite Linguistic Gender in a variety of languages. Changes in Linguistic Gender assignment to humans may reflect role reversals in traditional jocular relationships. Gender reversals may be offensive, or carry overtones of praise, or may imply endearment and solidarity. Having masculine gender forms as a functionally ‘unmarked’ category can be understood as a token of ‘male dominance’. Alternatively, having masculine gender as a ‘special’, marked one may be understood as a token of special importance and particular ‘visibility’ of males in cultural practices. The choice of Linguistic Gender may reflect stereotypes and expectations associated with Social Gender and with Natural Gender. This is especially salient for humans with their defined social roles, and particularly so in languages whose speakers are aware of the meanings of genders.