The typology of external splits

Abstract

The lexicon divides into parts of speech (or lexical categories), and there are cross-cutting regularities (features). These two dimensions of analysis take us a long way, but several phenomena elude us. For these the term 'split' is used extensively ('case split', 'split agreement', and more), but in confusingly different ways. Yet there is a unifying notion here. I show that a split is an additional partition, whether in the part-of-speech inventory or in the feature system. On this base an elegant typology can be constructed, using minimal machinery. The typology starts from four external relations (government, agreement, selection, and anti-government), and it specifies four types of split within each (sixteen possibilities in all). This typology (i) highlights less familiar splits, from diverse languages, and fits them into the larger picture; (ii) introduces a new relation, anti-government, and documents it; (iii) elucidates the complexities of multiple splits; and (iv) clarifies what exactly is split, which leads to a sharpening of our analyses and applies across different traditions.