paradigms

[Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy]

Hi Heidi

You said:
You wrote:
Did the original version of paradigm
economy predict something like Williams' Instantiated Basic Paradigm
requirement, such that there would be some maximally complex paradigm
in a language, and the syncretisms of that paradigm are carried over to
all the other simpler paradigms, plus some? Or did paradigm economy
only make claims about the cross-classifications predicted by having a
certain number of distinct affixes?

Only the latter.  What it said was that you can't have more paradigms (= inflection classes) for a given wordclass than there are competing inflectional exponents for whichever inflectional cell (or combination of feature values) is most generously endowed with exponents.  So, in my German example, the prediction would be that there should be no more than four inflection classes, because there are four exponents available for the most generously endowed cell, i.e. the Plural.  Too strong a claim, as you can see.

I did indeed have things to say about syncretism (a whole chapter on it in my 1987), but that was distinct from paradigm economy.  As for Williams's IBP idea -- it would be nice if it were true, but there is too much counterevidence, I think: the syncretisms in a given wordclass in a given language don't always nest neatly like Russian dolls.  There's a huge range of data on syncretism now available on line at the Surrey Syncretism Database run by the Surrey Morphology Group (Grev Corbett, Dunstan Brown and colleagues), and publications are emerging from there too.

You asked:
I guess what I really want to know is whether there's some paper of
yours that details the evolution of the paradigm economy idea, from its
former to its new instantiation, with the reasons for the changes?

My Language 1994 article compares my newer idea (blur avoidance) with the original paradigm economy idea, and attempts to show that blur avoidance is better.  It captures what's good about paradigm economy, it allows for counterexamples to strict PE such as German, and it is easy to see how a child could learn an inflection class system incorporating blur avoidance (whereas strict paradigm economy  posed learnability problems).

The last gasp of pure paradigm economy was in my chapter in Frans Plank (ed.) _Paradigms: The Economy of Inflection_ (Mouton, 1991).  I proposed there baroque elaborations, involving 'primary' and 'secondary' reference forms and the like, to try to take care of prima facie counterevidence (as in German).  That's all superseded.  But I also develop there further my argument that affixal inflection behaves differently from nonaffixal, and it's only when two lexemes differ affixally that they count as being in different inflection classes from the point of view of blur avoidance (or paradigm economy).  That, I think, is still correct.  Thus I differ from Greg Stump, and perhaps agree with DM, in thinking that there is an important theoretical difference between affixation and nonconcatenative processes.  It may indeed be that affixes are 'Vocabulary items', as per DM, whereas things such as umlaut and ablaut are not.

You said:
i'll have to look at your replies to bobajik and adger, bejar & harbor
-- didn't know they were out there! that would be a great collection of
stuff to have archived online somewhere together --

The Transactions of the Philological Society shouldn't be hard to get hold of in most places.  If your library doesn't subscribe, it should!  It must be the cheapest linguistic journal in the world -- only 10 UK pounds a year for two issues.  I'd be happy to have the stuff archived, though, provided that is consistent with the copyright requirements of TPhS and Blackwell (the publisher).

Best
Andrew