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This chapter focuses on the structure of experience, covering language, objects, scenes, and events. It is argued that partitioning the world is the first step to comprehending it. Some partitioning is so instantaneous and automatic that perception of the world is not of multimedia mixtures of continuously changing sensations but rather of coherent objects, events, and scenes. The mind goes on to parse those elements and to look for structure among the parts. Typically there is a perceptual basis for part structure. Truly understanding each of these elements of our lives requires assigning meaning to their parts.

This chapter turns to the encoding of the distinctions made at the Interpersonal and Representational Levels in morphosyntactic form. The layered structure distinguishes Clause, Phrase, Word and Morpheme as composing the Linguistic Expression. Hierarchical and equipollent relations in formulation are shown to influence this level in its dynamic implementation.

This chapter deals with the third and final type of degrammaticalization. Debonding is defined as ‘a change whereby a bound morpheme in a specific linguistic context becomes a free morpheme’. Like deinflectionalization, debonding involves bound morphemes, but where in deinflectionalization grams remain bound and gain a new function or meaning, in debonding affixes and clitics become free morphemes and do not necessarily gain a new function or meaning. Debonding can be said to comprise two subtypes, since inflectional affixes and clitics on the one hand and derivational affixes on the other behave slightly differently. Examples include infinitival markers, connective particles becoming free connectives, and numeral suffixes becoming quantifiers.

This chapter examines distributional patterns of English sounds and syllables, using the CELEX lexicon. It shows that most unused syllables are due not to phonological constraints but to the fact that English does not need many syllables to distinguish its inventory of morphemes.

The chapter investigates the variation at the level of morphology and at the level of productivity in the anti‐causative alternation on the basis of a non‐derivational approach to the alternation. It proposes to correlate the differences in productivity with the differences in the way languages morphologically mark the alternation. Two main groups of languages are identified. The behaviour of both groups will be shown to be related to properties of their (in)transitive syntax. The main claim of the chapter is that the morphology we see in the alternation should be taken seriously and is the device that helps us explain why anticausative and causative formation is freer in some languages than others. It is shown, first, that if a language lacks special morphological marking for de‐transitivization processes, this language will allow fewer roots to ender the anticausative alternation. Second, it is argued that certain languages are more productive than others in forming causatives, as they have a smaller root inventory, but have a number of functional morphemes to express causation/becoming.

This chapter clarifies the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model in a number of ways: identifying the Matrix Language (ML); details of the Matrix Language-Embedded Language opposition; the outsider late system morpheme of the 4-M model identified as the referent in the System Morpheme Principle; and the CP (projection of Complementizer) as the unit of analysis. Other topics include: doubling of plural morphemes (‘double morphology’); the Early System Morpheme hypothesis; speech errors as evidence for the 4-M model; and convergence at abstract lexical levels.

This chapter includes hypotheses derived from the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model, the 4-M model, and the Abstract Level model. Two themes are apparent. First, asymmetry characterizes the relationship of languages in all contact phenomena. Second, different morpheme types have different types of connections to abstract grammatical structure: content and early system morphemes are conceptually-activated, but late system morphemes (bridges and outsiders) are structurally-assigned. These differences affect the distribution of different morpheme types in contact phenomena.

This chapter develops a competence theory of the syntax-semantics interface. The interface is described in terms of how semantics is mapped to syntax. Thus, the problem to be addressed is: given a conceptual structure CS that needs to be expressed linguistically, how do the interface and the autonomous principles of syntax construct a syntactic structure SS in correspondence with CS? The opposite direction, mapping from syntax to semantics, will be shown to follow unproblematically from eventual formulation of the principles.

Building on the analysis of the Gungbe tense and aspect markers above, this chapter proposes a new analysis for the Gungbe imperfective and related clauses in terms of a biclausal structure. It suggests that the Gungbe imperfective marker selects for a small clause headed by a nominalizer ‘quasi null morpheme’. This morpheme encodes the feature [+n] associated with a nominalizing functional head that projects as the left-periphery of the small clause.

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.

This chapter argues for a morpheme-based alternative to the version of the Generalized Template Theory (GTT) of prosodic morpheme shapes critiqued in Chapter 2. In this approach (MBT), canonical shapes do not fall out from the Prosodic Hierarchy. Instead, the basic prosody-morpheme correlation is between the morpheme (Root or Affix) and the syllable. Lexical morphemes (Roots) tend to be branching syllables while affixes tend to be simplex syllables because lexical morphemes license more complex structure than non-lexical morphemes. Derived morphological constructions (Stems) tend to be minimally longer than single morphemes, as morphological branching is optimally matched by (disyllabic) prosodic branching. The first section of the chapter presents the general theoretical motivations for this alternative. The remaining sections provide detailed analyses of processes like reduplication, word minimality, templatic morphology, and hypocoristics, showing how the approach works and how it solves the problems discussed in Chapter 2.

This chapter draws together results and suggests that the accentual stability of very frequent words and of words containing frequent and synchronically recognized suffixes both result from the stability of lexical accents attaching to frequently occurring morphemes, whether lexical stems or suffixes. Further classes of Greek word are suggested (deverbative ā-stems; personal names) whose accentuation might have been influenced by the loss of analysis and the subsequent accentual regularization, and accentual phenomena in Latin and English are compared. Consequences for Indo-European, linguistic theory, and the understanding of accentual change are explored. A final section argues that the results do not prove the literal existence of synchronic phonological rules, but could also be expressed in terms of analogy-based morphological processing.

This chapter deals with the second type of degrammaticalization, involving bound morphemes. Deinflectionalization is defined as ‘a composite change whereby an inflectional affix in a specific linguistic context gains a new function, while shifting to a less bound morpheme type’. In order to be able to establish what changes in morphological status might qualify as an instance of this type of degrammaticalization, the chapter starts with an assessment of the inflection-derivation and the inflection-clitic interface, concluding that both a shift from inflectional affix to derivational affix and a shift from inflectional affix to clitic qualify as instances of deinflectionalization. Examples include the shift from inflectional genitive to enclitic s-genitive, and inflectional suffixes becoming derivational.

This chapter examines sound changes that occur at the boundaries between two words, setting up more than one variant for a word. What happens in such cases is interesting, because it is common for bound morphemes to have multiple variants but not so common for words to have variant forms. Based on final [s] reduction in Spanish dialects, the chapter argues that the spread of the reduced variant from pre-consonantal position (the original phonetic environment) to pre-vocalic position is the generalization of the more frequent variant—that which occurs before consonants. This chapter shows the power of the usage-based approach in explaining linguistic phenomena: the effect of frequency can explain why a word boundary so often behaves like a consonant. The reason is that word boundaries are most often followed by consonants and the more frequent variant eventually takes over. A second point is that the data show that individual words tend to resolve a large range of variation toward having a single variant.

Lexical diffusion refers to the way a sound change affects the lexicon. If a sound change is lexically abrupt, all the words of a language are affected by the sound change at the same rate. If a sound change is lexically gradual, individual words undergo the change at different rates or different times. This chapter examines how phonetic change interacts with words and affixes, using the case of [t]/[d] deletion and focusing on the reasons why the regular past tense affix shows a lower rate of deletion than [t] and [d] that belong to lexical morphemes. The data show that past tense [t] and [d] tend to occur before vowels more than monomorphemic [t] and [d]. Since the context before vowels does not favor deletion, the affix undergoes reduction and deletion process at a slower rate. This chapter also demonstrates that the reduction of a consonant in an affix in a uniform environment provides evidence that the affix and the words that contain it have a memory representation that can be affected by frequency of use.

This chapter indicates similarities and differences between convergence and attrition. It defines convergence as the restructuring of a clause's frame, and attrition as a replacement of either lexical or grammatical elements or both. Attrition is surveyed in most detail, with the argument that critical grammatical morphemes (i.e., late system morphemes under the 4-M model) are the last to be replaced. Attrition data comes from Scottish Gaelic, German, and Turkish.

Subjunctives of the type duim ‘I may give’ contain the same optative morpheme as the sigmatic faxim ‘I may do’. Similarly, they always have non-past meaning, but have peculiar restrictions of use in that they are absent in commands and ut-clauses, but frequent in prohibitions and subordinate nē-clauses. These forms also belong to an elevated register.

This chapter presents an analysis of the spelling variation found in the Older Scots plural noun {S} morpheme. The realisation of this morpheme as <is> or <ys>, as in acctionis ‘actions,’ has been claimed to be a diagnostic of the “Scottishness” of a text (e.g. Kniezsa 1997: 41). In ALinguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS), the most common realisation of {S} (61%) is in fact the scribal abbreviation <>; of non-abbreviated realisations, <is>/ys> in indeed the most frequent realisation, although it only accounts for 25% of all tokens. The abbrevation <> is often assumed to be functionally identical to <is/ys>, rather than to <(e)s>, in the literature. To test this assumption, the author uses generalised additive modelling. The Independent Variable that turned out to be the best predictor for the use of <> as opposed to a full form like <is> is the identity of the stem-final letter. The salient feature triggering <> is whether the stem-final letters terminates in a horizontal stroke or not. The realisation of the plural morpheme {S} in Older Scots legal texts, then, appears to be primarily motivated by palaeographical convenience.

This chapter provides a case study on the cartography of an exotic language and addresses the question of the functional articulation of clause structure based on the analysis of some functional morphemes of Imbabura Quichua. It shows that a semantic approach to the ordering of FPs cannot be adopted. As in other languages, cases of free ordering can be explained by hypothesizing that a certain morpheme realizes heads located at different heights in the syntactic tree. Facts that are problematic for Cinque’s hierarchy, such as transitivity failures or “ordering paradoxes,” can accordingly be explained in terms of “local” relationships among adjacent heads rather than a single “global” mapping of functional categories.

This chapter serves to introduce the basic concepts of lexical relatedness and the concept of a paradigm bequeathed to us from studies, ancient and modern, of inflectional systems. Words can be related by virtue of being inflected forms of the same lexeme, or they can be derivationally related, but there are a host of other ways that words can be related. I identify 16 logical possibilities, 15 of which are instantiated in the world’s languages. I then claim that there is a way of adapting the paradigm-based class of models of inflection to account for systematic types of lexical relatedness beyond inflection. The chapter sets out the issues and provides a chapter-by-chapter overview of the book. It concludes with an explanation of the degree of formalization to be used in the book: there is just enough to make the relevant points but no more.