Inflectional morphology refers to the mapping from grammatical information to surface forms, which are typically realized as morphemes. This mapping often exhibits fusion, where several abstract features are expressed in a single morpheme that cannot be decomposed into meaningful parts. Here, we discuss crosslinguistic generalizations of morphological fusion. We argue that fusion reflects principles of efficient processing, as formalized by the memory–surprisal tradeoff (Hahn, Degen, & Futrell 2021), which is based on information-theoretic models of language processing from psycholinguistics. We first show that the existence of fusion itself can, in some situations, lead communicative codes to be more efficient under our processing model. Particularly, we reveal via simulation that the fusion of highly correlated features is more efficient for processing, whereas agglutination is more efficient when features are less correlated. We next discuss crosslinguistic patterns of fusion in real languages. First, we analyze well-known generalizations about features that are commonly fused across languages (e.g. tense, aspect, and mood), as well as a typological pattern regarding suppletion. In both cases, we find that the universals we study tend to reflect a tendency toward more efficient structure under our model of language processing. Finally, we use paradigm and frequency data from four languages to study informational fusion, a gradable measure of fusion defined in Rathi et al. 2021. We find that informational fusion is higher when features are highly correlated, which suggests that gradable fusion is also influenced by optimization for the memory–surprisal tradeoff.

This study investigates an asymmetry in (Mandarin) Chinese-English word-internal code-switching: while Chinese inflectional morphemes readily attach to English verbs, Chinese derivational morphemes are consistently rejected when combined with English lexical bases. This pattern raises questions about how the free morpheme constraint should be formulated in bilingual grammar. Building on the phonetic form (PF) interface condition, as proposed in MacSwan’s [Generative approaches to codeswitching. In B. E. Bullock & A. J. Toribio (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of linguistic code-switching (pp. 309–335). Cambridge University Press (2009)], we argue that the asymmetry is best explained in a lexicalist model that permits post-syntactic affixation. In this approach, inflectional morphology may attach at PF through PF merger, whereas derivational morphology is assembled prior to syntax. The observed asymmetry thus follows from the distribution of morphology across components and the conditions governing the mapping from syntax to phonology. The findings show that derivational timing shapes code-switching, support the viability of lexicalist models that permit post-syntactic affixation, and indicate that word-internal code-switching is permitted under specific interface conditions.

We present a new phenomenon in inflectional morphology, ‘repartitioning’, based on data from Soq (Trans New Guinea). In repartitioning, the semantic boundary between two sets of morphological forms is redrawn in a single domain; one feature value takes over part, but not all, of the meaning of the other. In Soq the boundary is redrawn between the yesterday past tense and the hodiernal; the domain is the lexeme s- ‘stay’. For this one verb, the yesterday past takes over most of the range of the hodiernal, while the morphological forms remain regular. In clause chains the repartitioned verb surprisingly shows no syntactic effects. We demonstrate key differences from known phenomena, notably syncretism and overdifferentiation. Repartitioning is indeed new. It can be modeled in a theory based on default inheritance, but poses problems for other approaches. Finally, we present a typology of featural mismatches that situates Soq relative to known phenomena.

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.

A key notion in understanding language is ‘possible word (lexeme)’. While there are lexemes that are internally homogeneous and externally consistent, we find others with splits in their internal structure (morphological paradigm) and inconsistencies in their external behavior (syntactic requirements). I first explore the characteristics of the most straightforward lexemes, in order to establish a point in the theoretical space from which we can calibrate the real examples we find. I then schematize the interesting phenomena that deviate from this idealization, including suppletion, syncretism, deponency, and defectiveness. Next I analyze the different ways in which lexemes are ‘split’ by such phenomena. I set out a typology of possible splits, along four dimensions: splits that are (i) based on the composition/feature signature of the paradigm versus those based solely on morphological form; (ii) motivated (following a boundary motivated from outside the paradigm) versus purely morphology-internal (‘morphomic’); (iii) regular (extending across the lexicon) versus irregular (lexically specified); (iv) externally relevant versus irrelevant: we expect splits to be internal to the lexeme, but some have external relevance (they require different syntactic behaviors).

I identify instances of these four dimensions separately: they are orthogonal, and therefore not dependent on each other. Their interaction gives a substantial typology, and it proves to be surprisingly complete: the possibilities specified are all attested. The typology also allows for the unexpected patterns of behavior to overlap in particular lexemes, producing some remarkable examples. Such examples show that the notion ‘possible word’ is more challenging than many linguists have realized.

This article investigates the ways children begin spelling from the start of grade 1 to the end of grade 2 in France. It presents the results of a longitudinal study with 676 children faced to the complexity of French orthography and asked to write words and sentences. The corpus was analysed with regard to phonogrammic and morphogrammic principles at work in the French orthography.

Based on the literature and the specific features of the French writing system, we hypothesized that both skill types would develop as early as Grade 1 of elementary school, with lexical spelling skills developing more rapidly. The findings suggest that the development of the phonogrammic, lexical morphogrammic, and grammatical skills of pupils may take into account different variables: consistency, frequency, syntactic context within which words are used, words that can feature different morphograms or not.

This paper engages longstanding questions regarding how children acquire morphology in polysynthetic languages. It examines the roles of frequency, perceptual salience, and semantic complexity for morphemes in the acquisition of Northern East Cree possessive inflection, where prefixes and suffixes interact to encode possessors. Two studies analyze naturalistic video recordings of one adult and two children. Study 1 describes the frequency, salience, and complexity of possessor-encoding morphemes in the input. Study 2 traces the acquisition of these morphemes in child speech. Results indicate the acquisition of possessor inflection involves a combination of factors whose influences shift over time. Perceptual salience plays a key role in early noun production, but frequency later corresponds more clearly to acquisitional order for high-frequency morphemes. Complexity is hard to isolate from frequency, although neither factor clearly determines acquisitional order for low-frequency morphemes. The paper concludes by considering implications for science and potential applications for Cree communities.

This paper presents a usage-based cognitive approach to the different rates at which Icelandic masculine forms in nominative/accusative plural -ur are reanalysed as feminine. Of the 14.92% of nouns in plural -ur, 91.89% are feminine, others masculine. Syncretism in nominative/accusative plural is exceptionless among feminines, but relatively rare among masculines. Interestingly, plurals such as masculine eigendur ‘owners’, fætur ‘feet’, vetur ‘winters’ occasionally yield the feminine outputs definite eigendur-nar, fætur-nar, vetur-nar, and are sometimes modified by feminine forms of adjectives and determiners. As the full set of forms in plural -ur is highly schematic, we might expect reanalysis – viewed as a property of a schema’s productivity – to correlate proportionately with the frequency of corresponding masculine forms. However, corpus data for Icelandic betray a mismatch. Through a network model approach that emphasises prototype structure, minimal schematicity is shown to impact the rate of reanalysis by means of a gang effect.

This paper demonstrates that the language of the post-War generations of adult Haredi (that is, strictly Orthodox), primarily Hasidic, speakers of Yiddish in the major Hasidic centers worldwide lacks morphological case and gender. Elicited spoken and written data from native Haredi speakers of Yiddish from Israel and the United States, aged 18–87, and limited additional evidence from Canada and Belgium, reveal a complete absence of distinction between masculine, feminine, and neuter genders as well as between the nominative, accusative, and dative cases. While some speakers make use of a variety of morphological definite determiner and attributive adjective forms, their use is not determined by case or gender distinctions. Most of the speakers in our study have an invariable determiner pronounced as /dɛ/ or /di/, whereas the earlier case and gender suffixes on attributive adjectives have been reanalyzed as a single attributive marker, /ɛ/. These findings are consistent with our previous work on the loss of case and gender in the Hasidic Yiddish of London’s Stamford Hill and support our proposal that the Yiddish spoken in (primarily Hasidic) Haredi communities can be considered a distinct variety of the language known as Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish.*

This cross-sectional study examined the development of morphological awareness in Greek children 4–7 years old. A distinction was adopted between epilinguistic control, evidenced in judgment tasks and indicative of elementary levels of awareness, and metalinguistic awareness, evidenced in production tasks and indicative of full-blown conscious awareness. The morphological domains of inflectional and derivational morphology were specifically contrasted to determine whether they follow distinct developmental trajectories. Trial-level performance data from 236 children in four morphological awareness tasks as a function of age were modeled using generalized additive models. Significant performance increase with age was found for all four awareness tasks. The results further indicated that production of derivational morphemes was consistently more difficult than production of inflectional morphemes and judgment of derivational morphemes, whereas the differences between the two inflectional and between the two judgment tasks were not significant. This suggests that at these ages, epilinguistic control is similarly effective for the two morphological domains whereas full metalinguistic awareness of derivational morphology trails behind that of inflectional morphology, at least as measured by these specific tasks. The findings highlight the need for early tracking and finer distinctions within the domain of morphological awareness, to identify and potentially enhance the critical skills related to the development of vocabulary and reading comprehension.

The distance or similarity between two languages can be objective or actual, i.e. discoverable by the tools and methods of linguists, or perceived by users of the languages. In this article two methods, the Levenshtein Distance (LD), which purports to measure the objective distance, and the Index of Perceived Similarity (IPS), which quantifies language users’ perceptions, are compared. The data are the quantitative results of a test measuring conscious perceptions of similarity between Estonian and Finnish inflectional morphology by Finnish and Estonian native speakers (‘Finns’ and ‘Estonians’) with no knowledge of and exposure to the other (‘target’) language. The results show that Finns see more similarity between Finnish and Estonian than Estonians do. Also the correlations between LD and the perception results of the Finns are statistically significant while the correlations between the LD and the IPS scores of the Estonians are not. Comments by test participants provide insights into the nature of the perceptions of similarity.

Maiden (e.g. 2009a) shows that treating the paradigmatic distribution of root allomorphy in Romance verbs as morphomic, in the sense of Aronoff (1994), provides a coherent explanation for the diachronic behaviour of such allomorphy. The major templates for distribution (‘metamorphomes’, Round 2015) shared by most Romance varieties are also found in early French, but are not well represented in the modern language, which has developed new metamorphomes. By charting the diachronic development of metamorphomes in French, this study investigates the processes responsible for change to such templates. Overall, the French data point to segmental sound change as the central factor in change to metamorphomes: segmental sound change modifies the observable paradigmatic distribution of allomorphs, reducing the number of lexemes in which an existing metamorphomic template could be deduced, and increasing the number of lexemes across which a novel metamorphomic generalisation can be made. The loss of existing metamorphomes, and the rise of new ones, can be considered a single process, of metamorphomic templates changing shape as further paradigm cells attach to or defect from them. This process must be distinguished from changes in metamorphome shape due to the creation or elimination of paradigm categories for independent morphosyntactic reasons.