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

Abstract

To account for apparently idiosyncratic analogical changes in a variety of High & Low German dialects, a concept of morphological gangs is introduced & defined as a historically developed subset of the inflectional & derivational forms of a base word that has maintained its membership through perceptual salience, whereas nonsalient derivatives have remained outside the gang & have tended toward lexicalization. Primary focus is on two gangs, exemplified by (1) umlaut, vowel lengthening, & n-insertion phenomena in adjectives in various Swiss dialects; & (2) umlaut, vowel lengthening, & lexical intonation patterns in nouns in Limburg, Luxembourg, & Swiss dialects. It is argued that the predictability of these phenomena in terms of morphological gangs, ie, purely formal criteria, militates against a strict separation of inflection & derivation, as the operation of morphological gangs centers on a gray area including noun pluralization, adjective comparison, & diminutive formation. 54 References. J. Hitchcock