Monotonicity as an effective theory of morphosyntactic variation

Abstract

One of the major goals of linguistics is to delineate the possible range of variation across languages. Recent work has identified a surprising number of typological gaps in a variety of domains. In morphology, this includes stem suppletion, person pronoun syncretism, case syncretism, and noun stem allomorphy. In morphosyntax, only a small number of all conceivable Person Case Constraints and Gender Case Constraints are found. While various proposals have been put forward for each individual domain, few attempts have been made to give a unified explanation of the limited typology across all domains. This paper presents a novel account that deliberately abstracts away from the usual details of grammatical description in order to provide a domain-agnostic explanation of the limits of typological variation. This is achieved by combining prominence hierarchies, e.g. for person and case, with mappings from those hierarchies to the relevant output forms. As the mappings are required to be monotonic, only a fraction of all conceivable patterns can be instantiated.

Partially ordered case hierarchies

“…The present implementation of partially ordered case sequences is similar in some respects to Harðarson's (2016) proposal that case contiguity is weak, Zompì's (2019) proposal that classes of cases, rather than individual cases, are comparable, as well as Bárány's ( 2016) and Graf's (2019) partial orders. Harðarson's (2016) hierarchies represent total orders, which may, however, differ across languages.…”

“…By restricting partial orders to respect Zompì's (2019) generalisations about classes of cases in (5) and syncretism in (6) as stated in ( 22), this proposal accounts for at least the languages covered by those approaches and, crucially, avoids Starke's (2017) multiple instances of the "same" dependent case. The analysis presented here is similar to Graf's (2019), but corresponds to Zompì's (2019) universal containment more directly. The hierarchies are partially ordered by a subset relation (⊂).…”

“…In this paper, I also propose an analysis of patterns of syncretism that does not presuppose a total order on a case hierarchy but which nevertheless retains case contiguity. I suggest that rather than conceiving of a case sequence as a total order, it can be thought of as a partially ordered set (or poset) such that not all elements of the case "hierarchy" need to be ordered with respect to each other (Figure 1; see also Bárány 2016;Graf 2019). (Partee, Meulen & Wall 1990: 278).…”

“…Zompì's (2019) hierarchy in ( 5) is universal, but refers to classes of mutually unordered cases. Similarly, Graf (2019) posits different levels on which cases are incomparable.…”

“…These layers are shown in (29). Graf (2019) proposes the generalisation in (30), banning certain "parallel" syncretisms between the second and third layers of (29). 3 (Graf 2019: 22) No case paradigm may display two distinct syncretism patterns A-X and B-Y such that A and B belong to the second case layer and X and Y to the third.…”