Morphological ‘gangs’: constraints on paradigmatic relations in analogical change

Abstract

In a wide variety of modern High and Low German dialects, historical phonological developments led to the creation of stem allomorphy in certain inflectional and derivational forms of the same base word. Subsequently, different types of (segmental and suprasegmental) analogical change conspired to maintain the formal relationship between the stems in various subsets of the derivatives concerned. These analogical developments were not motivated by the desire to highlight the relationship between form and meaning, as is often the case with analogical change (see Mayerthaler 1981, Dressler et al. 1987), but by a general tendency to systematise the purely formal connections between the members of the subsets. In this way, the German developments provide a classic example of ‘Morphology by Itself (Aronoff 1994), in which morphological properties of words are keyed to each other without any semantic motivation. Indeed, the analogical changes in the German dialects are often ‘unnatural’, in the sense of e.g. (1981), in that they promote and even create new allomorphy and therefore lead to a complication of the derivational process as a whole. Thus, it is no longer possible to derive certain forms from a base without first referring to other members of the subset concerned, as the formal properties of one member may influence those of others. This type of influence is clearly paradigmatic, but as it apparently cuts across the inflection/derivation divide we need to use the term paradigm in a much wider sense to include derivation as well as inflection (see also Booij 1997)².