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 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.
Highlights
One of the major goals of linguistics is to delineate the possible range of variation across languages
The central goal of this paper is to develop such an effective theory for certain areas of morphology and morphosyntax that have attracted a lot of attention in recent years: (1) a
2. the mapping from this hierarchy to surface forms must be feasibly monotonic. These two assumptions explain the absence of ABA patterns, but they still allow for AAB patterns, which are unattested cross-linguistically
Summary
One of the major goals of linguistics is to delineate the possible range of variation across languages. 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. In contrast to generative accounts such as Anagnostopoulou (2005), Nevins (2007), Caha (2009), Bobaljik (2012), and Zompí (2016), the monotonicity approach provides a unified solution for all the phenomena above, rather than just one or two of them This is because as an effective theory, my proposal [4]. My account is less radical in its quest for content-agnostic explanations as each domain may come with its own base hierarchy This makes the approach easier to apply to specific phenomena.
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