Book Review: "Defective paradigms: missing forms and what they tell us"
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31513/linguistica.2014.v10n1a4578Abstract
This book collects a number of papers on the topic of defectiveness, which can be defined as when the morphosyntactic space is not fully realized by the exponent space. An example with which Baerman & Corbett (contributors to this volume henceforth in smallcaps) begin in the introduction to the book is the Russian feminine noun meÄt-á ‘dream', which lacks a genitive plural form. This is presumably because the form is stressed on the desinence in all of its inflected forms, except the genitive plural, which has no desinence. (The authors, unfortunately, do not include stress in their transcriptions or discussion of this example). The generalization about this noun and a number of others in Russian that are defective in the genitive plural (most notably, kochergá ‘poker', about which the author Zoshchenko wrote a well-known short story; Bailyn & Nevins (2008:262)) is that they seem to lack a rhizotonic allomorph. This is, in fact, a very well-chosen example with which to begin the book, as stressed-conditioned allomorphy (and in the special case at hand, a null, or absent allomorph) is a theme that runs through many of the contributions in this book, especially those on the Romance languages, viz. those by Maiden & O'Neill, Boyé & Cabredo Hofherr, and Anderson.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish in the Revista Linguí∫tica agree with the following terms:
The authors maintain their rights, ceding to the journal the right to first publication of the article, simultaneously submitted to a Creative Commons license permitting the sharing with third-parties of published content as long as it mentions the author and its first publication in the Revista Linguí∫tica.
Authors may enter into additional agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of their published work (for example, posting in online institutional or non-profit repositories, or book chapters) so long as they acknowledge its initial publication in the Revista Linguí∫tica.
The journal Revista Linguí∫tica is published by the Post-Graduate program in Linguistics of UFRJ and employs a Creative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC).