Inflectional Defectiveness

Andrea D. 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