English plurals in Construction Morphology

Abstract

Halle and Marantz (1993) criticize Anderson's (1992) Extended Word-and-Paradigm Theory of morphology on two grounds: first, it does not account for the fact that a plural like oxen clearly consists of a root ox combined with a suffix –en; and second, Anderson's ‘blocking’ principle (1992:134), formulated in order to prevent the generation of incorrect doubly marked forms like *oxens, also prevents the formation of correct doubly marked forms like wives.The theory of Construction Morphology (Booij, 2010, 2016), like Anderson's theory, is based on words and their paradigmatic relations. This article demonstrates how the theory of Construction Morphology can account for both the regular and irregular plural forms of English nouns, while avoiding the problems Halle and Marantz have identified in the Extended Word-and-Paradigm Theory. The fact that Construction Morphology (CxM) allows representations ‘at varying degrees of abstraction’ (Goldberg 2013) enables it to account for the morphological structure of forms like oxen. The fact that it is non-derivational precludes incorrect forms like *oxens, while allowing correct forms like wives.