French Pronominal Clitics and the Design of Paradigm Function Morphology

Abstract

Realizational approaches to inflectional morphology (e.g. Matthews, 1972; Anderson, 1992; Zwicky, 1992; Aronoff, 1994; Stump, 2001) generally presuppose that the realization relation is a function: for each cell in a lexeme's paradigm, the morphology provides a single realization. Although there are well known exceptions to this generalizations (e.g. individual lexemes with two distinct paradigms) these are usually assumed to be very local and are taken to be exceptional irregularities. In this paper we exhibit an extended example of an inflectional system that is highly nonfunctional, the system of French Pronominal Clitics (henceforth FPCs). Although many authors have argued that FPCs should be treated within inflectional morphology, the fact that they violate functionality has not been discussed previously. After reviewing the relevant data we provide an analysis of the FPC system within Paradigm Function Morphology (Stump, 2001), and propose a modification of the framework to allow for a single feature combination to give rise to more than one realization.