Defective Paradigms

An important design feature of language is the use of productive patterns in inflection. In English, we have pairs such as 'enjoy' ~ 'enjoyed', 'agree' ~ 'agreed', and many others. On the basis of this productive pattern, if we meet a new verb 'transduce' we know that there will be the form 'transduced'. Even if the pattern is not fully regular, there will be a form available, as in 'understand' ~ 'understood'. Surprisingly, this principle is sometimes violated, a phenomenon known as defectiveness, which means there is a gap in a word's set of forms: for example, given the verb 'forego', many if not most people are unwilling to produce a past tense.

Although such gaps have been known to us since the days of Classical grammarians, they remain poorly understood. Defectiveness contradicts basic assumptions about the way inflectional rules operate, because it seems to require that speakers know that for certain words, not only should one not employ the expected rule, one should not employ any rule at all. This is a serious problem, since it is probably safe to say that all reigning models of grammar were designed as if defectiveness did not exist, and would lose a considerable amount of their elegance if it were properly factored in.

This volume addressed these issues from a number of analytical approaches - historical, statistical and theoretical - and by using studies from a range of languages.

Readership: Scholars and students of linguistics

Edited by Matthew Baerman, Research Fellow, University of Surrey, Greville G. Corbett, Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Russian Language, University of Surrey; Fellow of the British Academy, and Dunstan Brown, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, University of Surrey

Matthew Baerman & Greville G. Corbett: Introduction: Defectiveness: typology and diachrony
Stephen R. Anderson: Failing one's obligations: defectiveness in Rumantsch reflexes of DEBERE
Gilles Boyé & Patricia Cabredo Hofherr: Defectiveness as stem suppletion in French and Spanish verbs
Andra Kalnaca & Ilze Lokmane: Defective paradigms of reflexive nouns and participles in Latvian
John Löwenadler: Relative acceptability of missing adjective forms in Swedish
Agnes Lukács, Péter Rebrus & Miklós Törkenczy: Defective verbal paradigms in Hungarian: description and experimental study
Martin Maiden & Paul O'Neill: On morphomic defectiveness: evidence from the Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula
Marianne Mithun: The search for regularity in irregularity: defectiveness and its implications for our knowledge of words
Milan Rezac: Ineffability through modularity: gaps in the French clitic cluster
Gregory Stump: Interactions between defectiveness and syncretism