Grammatically conditioned allomorphy, paradigmatic structure, and the Ancestry Constraint

Abstract

When inflectional allomorphy is grammatically conditioned, are there any constraints on the direction of conditioning (inward or outward)? Claims made by Bobaljik (2000) and Carstairs (1987) are compared with respect to data from Hungarian, Itelmen and Latin. An answer is suggested that exploits the notion of direct ancestry (relationships between (grand)mothers and (grand-)daughters) in word-structure trees, and the notion of blur avoidance in paradigmatic structure (Carstairs-McCarthy 1994). Implications for Stump's (2001) theory of paradigm structure are briefly discussed.

Ellipsis as obliteration: Evidence from Bengali negative allomorphy

“…So, contra Bobaljik (2000), inward-sensitivity to morphosyntactic features appears to be required. This is in line with proposals in Carstairs (1987) and Carstairs-McCarthy (2001), which maintain that a certain degree of inward-sensitivity must be available to account for inflectional patterns in Latin for example. Since inward sensitivity in Bobaljik's system was achieved through a replacive insertion algorithm, I will adopt a system that is additive, not replacive.…”

Locality, Listedness, and Morphological Identity

“…It is an open question at this point whether the combination of structural and linear conditions on allomorphy extend to the full set of cases that were treated by either the Adjacency Condition of the 1970s or the Atom Condition. Some specific cases have been cited as especially problematic for locality-based conceptions of allomorphy; for instance, Carstairs-McCarthy (1992) notes some apparent problems for conditions involving adjacency, in the domain of Latin deponent verbs. See Embick & Halle (forthcoming) for an analysis.…”

“…argues that if one assumes insertion from the Root outwards, as has been the norm in Distributed Morphology, then contextual allomorphy at Y could refer to the actual exponent inserted at X, but not to the exponent inserted at Z. For some comments relevant to this latter claim, see alsoCarstairs-McCarthy (2001).…”

Machine Learning of Inflection

“…While a large scale empirical investigation into this topic is yet to be undertaken, several theoretical proposals (based on small samples of languages) hypothesize specific locality restrictions on contextual allomorphy (Siegel, 1978;Bobaljik, 2000;Carstairs-McCarthy, 2001;Embick, 2010). In these proposals conditions on the distance between the dependent morphemes are typically stated in terms of hierarchical structure of words.…”