Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy: Blur avoidance in Polish

[Martha McGinnis]

Blur avoidance in Polish (joint work with Thea Cameron-Faulkner)
_____

The 'No Blur Principle' (Carstairs-McCarthy 1994) asserts that, within a
set of competing inflection classes (i.e. classes whose membership is not
determined on a phonological, syntactic or semantic basis), each of the
rival inflectional affixes for some paradigmatic cell must be either (a) a
class-identifier (i.e. peculiar to one inflection class), or else (b) the
class-default (i.e. the *sole* affix that is not a class-identifier).
Affixes that are neither class-identifiers nor class-defaults are
'blurred'.  The principle therefore amounts to saying that blurring will
not occur.

At first sight there is massive blurring in the Singular declension of
Polish Masculine nouns.  Here, prima-facie blurred affixes are accompanied
by %:

Class		1	2	3	4	5	6	7
Sg	Nom	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
	Gen	%a	%a	%a	%a	%a	%u	%u
	Dat	%owi	%owi	%u	%u	%owi	%owi	%owi
	Instr	em	em	em	em	em	em	em
	Loc	%e	%u	%e	%u	%u	%e	%u
	Voc	%e	%u	%e	%e	%e	%e	%u

However, on closer examination it turns out that -e and -u in the Locative
and Vocative are not true rivals, so they can be lumped together as a
single 'macroinflection'.  We then find that the seven inflection classes
collapse to three, with no blurring at all!  In this table,
class-identifiers are in capitals:

Class		1/2/5	3/4	6/7
Sg	Nom	-	-	-
	Gen	a	a	U
	Dat	owi	U	owi
	Instr	em	em	em
	Loc	e/u	e/u	e/u
	Voc	e/u	e/u	e/u

The basis for treating -e and -u as not true rivals is that they are
differentiated on the basis of the accompanying stem alternant.  The suffix
-u means just plain 'Locative (or Vocative)'; -e, on the other hand, means
'Loc (or Voc), with strange stem alternant', where a strange stem alternant
is one that is different from the alternant found in most of the rest of
the paradigm.

This account involves treating a stem alternant as a kind of inflectional
'meaning'; but there can be no objection to that, since there is
independent evidence that inflectional affixes can have purely
intramorphological 'meanings'.  Also, this account solves a mystery about
the absence of vacuous palatalization in modern Polish.  Historically,
'strange' alternants are palatal(ized), the palatalization being triggered
by the front-vowel suffix -e.  But in modern Polish the suffix -e is never
found on nouns whose stem is palatal(ized) throughout the paradigm.
Correspondingly, -u has an at first sight odd distribution, being found
both on nouns whose stem is *never* palatal(ized), and on nouns whose stems
is palatal(ized) *throughout*.  The mystery disappears, however, if we take
it that what -e and -u now pay attention to is not the phonological shape
of the stem (a fortiori, -e does not trigger a phonological rule that
changes the stem's shape), but rather the distribution of the accompanying
stem alternant within the paradigm.

The No Blur Principle and the distribution of stem alternants as affixal
'meanings' thus cooperate to make Polish Masculine noun inflection much
less messy than at first appears.  This analysis presupposes, however, that
inflectional paradigms are 'real'.  Polish therefore lends further support
to their reality.

Comments welcome!

Andrew


Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
Associate Professor
Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800,
Christchurch, New Zealand
phone (work) +64-3-364 2211; (home) +64-3-355 5108
fax +64-3-364 2969
e-mail a.c-mcc at ling.canterbury.ac.nz
http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/adc-m.html

mcginnis at ucalgary.ca