concord, agreement and suppletion

[Ora Matushansky]

Hi all,

At 12:20 PM 1/16/2003 +1300, you wrote:
>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 should probably clarify my comment. First of all, what I said is that if
the *only* difference between gender and declension class is that the
latter doesn't spread syntactically (i.e. gender and declension class are
two special cases of GROUP-X), then they should not appear on one noun
(just as you don't expect a noun, at least an inanimate noun, to have two
genders). And I think this (obviously wrong) prediction is valid for the
definition given.

Secondly, to say that declension class is defined as something that doesn't
spread is not much more than a description of the facts. I want to know
why, and that can only follow if syntactic spreading is *not* the
definition. Saying that is's *something* that doesn't spread doesn't help.

>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!).

Which is why I don't want to confuse the two: there is something that
determines which paradigm of Case endings a particular noun (or adjective)
fits. It has additional interesting properties, such as (1) interaction
with gender beyond the tendency to put nouns of the same gender in the same
declension class (in the case of the so-called "common gender" in Russian),
(2) the inability to spread syntactically, (3) no semantic connotations,
and (4) the inability to be referred to by pronouns (i.e. a noun of the
declension class Y will not be pronominalized by a pronoun of the class Y,
though the pronoun may have some declension class). I don't know whether
these characteristics always go together because they come only from two
languages, Latin and Russian, where both gender and declension class exist
and so there's no fear of confusion.

>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.

I'm sure you know that there's also a paper by Philippe Schlenker on the
topic of German adjectives and Case marking, with a different analysis:
         "La Flexion de l'adjectif en allemand: la morphologie de haut en
bas" (in French), Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes, 28, 1999

O
Ora Matushansky

CNRS - UMR 7023 (Paris 8)
email: matushan at noos.fr
page web: http://mapage.noos.fr/matushan/