Andrew Nevins

Asaf Bachrach

A recurrent issue in linguistic theory and psychology concerns the cognitive status of memorized lists and their internal structure. In morphological theory, the collections of inflected forms of a given noun, verb, or adjective into inflectional paradigms are thought to constitute one such type of list. This book focuses on the question of which elements in a paradigm can stand in a relation of partial or total phonological identity. Leading scholars consider inflectional identity from a variety of theoretical perspectives, with an emphasis on both case studies and predictive theories of where syncretism and other "paradigmatic pressures" will occur in natural language. The authors consider phenomena such as allomorphy and syncretism while exploring questions of underlying representations, the formal properties of markedness, and the featural representation of conjugation and declension classes. They do so from the perspective of contemporary theories of morphology and phonology, including Distributed Morphology and Optimality Theory, and in the context of a wide range of languages, among them Amharic, Greek, Romanian, Russian, Saami, and Yiddish. The subjects addressed in the book include the role of featural decomposition of morphosyntactic features, the status of paradigms as the unit of syncretism, asymmetric effects in identity-dependence, and the selection of a base-of-derivation. The Bases of Inflectional Identity will interest linguists and cognitive scientists, especially students and scholars of phonological theory and the phonology-morphology and mind-language interfaces at graduate level and above.

Inflectional Identity

Isabelle Roy

Linnaea Stockall

While the argument structure of verbs has long been a central issue in linguistic research of all varieties and continues to be a vexed area of research across a wide range of theoretical and empirical approaches, the inter-disciplinary perspective and dialogue remain largely under explored. This collection stems from an interest to find and explore practical, tangible points of intersection between theoretical linguists, psycholinguists and neurolinguists working on problems related to the representation and processing of verbs and their associated thematic structure. The book is organized around three core themes, (i) the basic building blocks of verbal representations and modes of construction of the verb-argument complex, (ii) non-canonical argument structure realization, with a particular focus on object-experiencer psych verbs, and (iii) the promises and challenges of neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic investigation into argument structure and the prospects for the future of interdisciplinary research on verb argument structure.

Asaf Bachrach

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