concord, agreement and suppletion

[Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy]

Hi all

I don't understand Ora's point (a) below.  I think Rolf is right:
declension class is *by definition* something that isn't involved in
agreement (though see below for a little further comment).  This
definition in no way entails that gender and declension class cannot
coexist in the same language; they do in Latin, Russian and many
other languages, as Ora rightly says.

I think some confusion may arise through a tendency I've noticed (an
unfortunate one, I think) to treat declension class membership as if
it were a morphosyntactic feature, just like gender, number,
definiteness, etc. Yet declension class is not morpho*syntactic*, but
purely morphological: it belongs to 'morphology by itself' (if I dare
use that phrase to a DM audience!).

My 'little further comment' concerns the weak, strong and mixed
'declensions' of German adjectives: the suffix that the adjective
carries depends on what suffix, if any, a preceding determiner has.
This looks superficially like a sort of declensional *dis*agreement,
or dissimilation. But in any case it is not 'declension class
agreement', because determiners are not assignable to declension
classes in German. Rather, what it shows is that there are factors
other than gender that can exert a superficially gender-like
syntagmatic influence on inflectional behaviour. I talk about this
briefly, along with an Afrikaans and a Georgian example, in section
4.4 of my article 'Inflection classes, gender and the Principle of
Contrast' in Language 70 (1994), 737-88.

Best
Andrew

>Dear Rolf,
>
>Thanks very much for your answer - it does suggest that the generalization
>is valid. There are however some problems defining "declension
>class" this way:
>(a)	it makes the prediction that gender and declension class cannot
>co-exist (since the only difference between them is whether they spread or
>not) - this prediction is wrong (cf. Latin, Russian...)
>(b)	it lumps declension class together with other accidentally
>non-spreading features, e.g. gender in English. Conversely, if you say that
>gender features may not spread, then it becomes impossible to know whether
>a particular noun class distinction (in a language with Case) is gender or
>declension class
>(c)	it ignores the fact that declension class has no semantic correlation
>(even though gender is often arbitrary, it quite often connects to genuine
>"real-world" distinctions).
>(d)	(perhaps as a subpart of (c)), declension class cannot be overridden:
>e.g. masculine nouns denoting humans can be treated as feminine (cf. la
>mEdico in European Spanish, moja vrach 'my-F doctor-M' in Russian), but I
>don't think it's ever possible to put a noun in a different declension
>class (unless such a switch is entailed by the switch in natural gender)
>(e)	my guess is that genders cannot be unproductive, while declension and
>conjugation classes can - but I don't know enough about languages with
>(agreeing) noun classes to be sure.
>
>I don't have a precise definition in mind, but my impression is that a
>declension class is so much more a property of a noun stem that it may be
>likened to the verbal theme suffixes... though these latter can be used to
>signal a switch to subjunctive in Spanish...
>
>O
>Ora Matushansky
>
>CNRS - UMR 7023 (Paris 8)
>email: matushan at noos.fr
>page web: http://mapage.noos.fr/matushan/

--
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