Inflectional Defectiveness

Andrea Sims is Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University. Her research interests include theoretical morphology, the morphology-syntax interface, the organization of the lexicon, and the relationship between lexical processing and morphological structure.

• List of tables; List of figures; List of abbreviations; Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. Defining inflectional defectiveness; 3. On the causes of inflectional defectiveness; 4. Productivity, defectiveness, and syncretism; 5. Principal parts, predictability, and paradigmatic gaps; 6. Irreducible gaps and the morphologization of defectiveness; 7. On learnability and the dynamic organization of the lexicon; 8. The implicative structure of the paradigm and other concluding thoughts; Appendix. Information-theoretic and other probability-based measures of inflectional structure.

'Sims' study is an important contribution to our understanding of inflectional systems. It is a very wide-ranging survey of defectiveness and makes a compelling case for treating it as an important and often very systematic property of inflectional systems. At the same time the book provides a clear and readable survey of the key features of the information-theoretic word-and-paradigm model, and shows how defectiveness can provide a strong motivation for that model.' Andrew Spencer, University of Essex