paradigms

[Daniel L. Everett]

Folks,

I am still bothered by a lack of understanding on my part as to how DM
would handle non-compositional meaning in periphrastic morphology, when
that meaning corresponds exactly to what would be expected for
individual  paradigm cells. That is, the basic idea is that the
meanings of the phrases are not composed bottom-up, but that their
literal meanings are overridden  to meet the 'needs' of the paradigm.

I won't bother to include examples here, because this issue won't
interest everyone. But one robust case is documented in the first half
of the Liminal Categories paper on my website.

Prima facie, this type of phenomenon would seem to offer strong support
for a word and paradigm type of morphology, against a syntactic-tree
approach. But I wouldn't want to say this without hearing from readers
of this list, who have repaired my understanding on previous occasions.

Dan


---------------------------------------------
Daniel L. Everett
Postgraduate Programme Director
Professor of Phonetics & Phonology
Department of Linguistics and English Language
University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL UK
Fax: 44-161-275-3187
Phone: 44-161-275-3158
http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de/