concord, agreement and suppletion

[Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy]

Hello all

I'd like to follow up on a point that Ora Matushansky makes in her
second posting on this topic, on 18 January.

I think part of our disagreement is terminological, so not really
interesting.  For me, to define 'declension class' as something that
doesn't spread does not preclude inquiry into *why* it doesn't spread
-- that is, it doesn't preclude inquiry into why declension class
systems (so defined) exist, alongside gender systems.  We are all (I
take it) interested in that 'why' question.

The line of inquiry that I've pursued for some years involves
exploring to what extent seemingly arbitrary inflectional complexity
can be related to Eve Clark's Principle of Contrast.  Can it be shown
that, whenever a language has three distinct genitive singular
suffixes (say), they are *all* associated with some clearly
identifiable difference in information content?  The information
content in question may be extragrammatical (e.g. animate vs
inanimate; V-final stem vs C-final stem) or extramorphological
('masculine' vs 'feminine', where these are arbitrary gender labels)
or even intramorphological (e.g. *unambiguous* indication of the
affixal inflectional behaviour of the noun in question in all
grammatical contexts, i.e. unambigous identification of its affixal
declension class)?  Conceivably, the answer is 'no'.  But I think the
evidence so far is promising.

What sort of difference in information content will suffice, for
'Contrast' purposes?  Almost anything, it seems, provided it is
clearcut.  Consider -im and -em as masculine accusative singular
endings in Latin.  Once upon a time the -i- clearly belonged to the
stem, so there was really only ending here.  When the stem-affix
boundary became blurred through phonological changes, -im disappeared
entirely for many speakers, it seems.  But for some speakers it was
retained productively in just one context: names of rivers.  Is there
any point in having a distinct acc.sg. ending for river names?
Hardly!  But that association was good enough to ensure that -im and
-em differed in information content.  (This oversimplifies slightly,
but see my chapter in _Papers from the 6th ICHL_, ed. J. Fisiak,
1985.)

Or consider -e and -u as locative (or prepositional) singular
suffixes in Russian and Polish masculine nouns.  Once upon a time,
again, this difference belonged to the stem rather than the suffix:
o-stems vs u-stems.  But again the stem-affix boundary got blurred.
So what happened?  Russian and Polish have both retained both
suffixes, but differentiate them informationally in completely
different ways.  In Russian, for those nouns where -u is available,
it is used only in the context of prepositions with spatial meanings,
while -e is used elsewhere (_v lesu, v sadu_ 'in the forest, in the
garden' versus _o lese, o sade_ 'concerning the forest/the garden').
(Ora will correct me if I've got this wrong, I'm sure!) In Polish, by
contrast, -e is used with those masculine nouns that make available a
different stem alternant for the locative from the one used elsewhere
in the singular, while -u is used with those nouns that don't.  Which
nouns make available this special locative stem alternant is another
story: it is partly but not wholly predictable on the basis of stem
phonology.  But, so far as the -e/-u choice in the locative singular
goes, the generalisation that I've made is exceptionless (so far as I
can discover).  So -u means just 'locative singular', while -e is
differentiated as meaning 'locative singular plus unusual stem
alternant'.  (More on this in NLLT 2000, in an article by Thea
Cameron-Faulkner and me.)

One can easily envisage that human brains might have been built so as
to avoid encoding distinctions that are pointless both
communicatively and from the point of view of the mental
representation of experience.  But that's not how brains are, it
seems.  They handle pointless distinctions with ease, provided that
these distinctions are sufficiently clearcut.

Thanks, Ora, for the details of the paper by Schlenker, which I will pursue.

Andrew
--
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
Professor and Head of Department
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 andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at canterbury.ac.nz
http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/adc-m.html