STRUCTURE AND INNOVATION OF DECLENSION PATTERNS IN INFLECTING LANGUAGES: MOTIVATED DISTRIBUTION AND MARKEDNESS PRINCIPLE

• Published in: 언어학, 0(51) pp. 43 - 70
• Main Author: 최성호
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 사단법인 한국언어학회 01.08.2008
• Subjects: 언어학
• ISSN: 1225-7494; 2508-4429

This study aims to propose a unified principle regulating synchronic organization and diachronic innovation of desinence patterns. In order to achieve this goal, it analyzes primarily Czech and Latin data, and provides some preliminary discussion of new concepts such as desinence patterns and distributional factors. This article points out that the analytic object of affixal morphology should not be inflectional paradigms, which obtain as a result of taxonomic classification on realizational identity and are formulated from the perspective of lexical selection of the appropriate set of affixes, but rather desinence patterns, which obtain from the perspective of affixal distribution and are postulated on the basis of distributional similarities. This claim is derived from the critical review of the previous studies such as Wurzel (1989), Carstairs-McCarthy (1994, 2000), where their pursuit of some organizational and innovational motivation is essentially based upon a lexeme's inflectional paradigm and the affixal relation only, thus ignoring the content side of linguistic units. The current study concludes that desinence patterns are a sort of allomorphs, and as far as they are linguistic units, they have their own forms and distributions. Establishment of the pattern’s form is an identification judgment based upon affixal difference, and distribution of the pattern is contexts based upon lexical identity. Further, desinence patterns are variations, and so their distribution follows the general Paninian principle, which means that no further principle specifically postulated for this domain of grammar is necessary. Finally, the principle predicts that the innovation of desinence patterns take place when their distributions become arbitrary. KCI Citation Count: 4