Category: Phonology

Phonological nihilism

One might argue that phonology is in something of a crisis period. Phonology seems to be going through early stages of grief for what I see as the failure of teleological, substance-rich, constraint-based, parallel-evaluation approaches to make headway, but the next paradigm shift is yet to become clear to us. I personally think that logical, substance-free, serialist approaches ought to represent our next i-phonology paradigm, with “evolutionary”-historical thinking providing the e-language context, but I may be wrong and altogether different paradigm may be waiting in the wing. The thing that troubles me is that phonologists from these still-dominant constraint-based traditions seem to have less and less faith in the tenets of their theories, and in the worst case this expresses itself as a sort of nihilism. I discern two forms of this nihilism. The first is the phonologist who thinks we’re doing “word sudoku”, playing games of minimal description that produce generalizations without a shred of cognitive support. The second is the phonologist who thinks that everything is memorized, so that the actual domain of phonological generalization are just Psych 101 subject pool nonce word experiments. My pitch to both types of nihilists is the same: if you truly believe this, you ought to spend more time at the beach and less in the classroom, and save some space in the discourse for those of us who believe in something.

Thought experiment #3

[The semester is finally winding down and I am back to writing again.]

Let us suppose one encounters a language in which the only adjacent consonants are affricates like [tʃ, ts, tɬ].1 One might be tempted to argue that these affricates are in fact singleton contour phonemes2 and that the language does not permit true consonant clusters.3

Let us suppose instead that one finds a language in which word-internal nasal-stop clusters are common, but nasal-glide and nasal-liquid clusters are not found except at transparent morpheme boundaries.4 One then might be tempted to argue that in this language, nasal-stop clusters are in fact sequences of nasal followed by an oral consonant rather than singleton contour phonemes.

In my opinion, neither of these argument “go through”. They follow from nothing, or at least nothing that has been explicitly stated. Allow me to explain, but first, consider the following hypothetical:

The metrical system of Centaurian, the lingua franca of the hominid aliens of the Alpha Centauri system, historically formed weight-insensitive trochees, with final extrametricality for prosodic words with odd syllable count of more than one syllable. However, a small group of Centaurian exiles have been hurtling towards the Sol system at .05 parsecs a year (roughly 1m MPH) for the last century or so. Because of their rapid speed of travel it is impossible for these pioneers to stay in communication with their homeworld, and naturally their language has undergone drift over the past few centuries. In particular, Pioneer Centaurian (as we’ll call it) has slowly but surely lost all the final extrametrical syllables of Classical Centaurian, and as a result there are no longer any 3-, 5-, 7- or 9- (etc.) syllable words in the Pioneer dialect.

As a result of a phonetically well grounded, “plausible”, Neogrammarian sound change, Pioneer Centaurian (PC) lacks long words with an odd number of syllables, though it still has 1-syllable words. What then is the status of this generalization in the grammar of PC speakers? The null hypothesis has to be that it has no status at all. Even though the lexical entries of PC have undergone changes, the metrical grammar of PC could easily be identical to Classical Centaurian: weight-intensitive trochees, with a now-vacuous rule of final extrametricality. Furthermore, it is quite possible that PC speakers have simply not noticed the relevant metrical facts, either consciously or subconsciously. Would PC speakers rate, say, 4-syllable nonce words as ill-formed possible words? No one knows. When PC speakers inevitably come in contact with English, will be they be reluctant to borrow a 6-syllable words like anthropomorphism or detoxification into their language, or will they feel the need to append or delete a syllable to conform to their language’s lexicon? Once again, no one knows.

The same is essentially true of the aforementioned language in which the only consonant clusters are affricates, or the aforementioned language in which nasal-consonant clusters are highly restricted. It might be the case that the grammar treats the former as single segments and the grammar treats the latter as clusters, but absolutely nothing presented thus far suggests it has to be true.

Let us refer to the idea that the grammar needs to encode phonotactic generalizations (somehow) as the phonotactic hypothesis. I have argued—though more for the sake of argument than out of genuine commitment—for a constrained version of this hypothesis; I note that any surface-true rule will rule out certain surface forms. Thus, if desired, one can derive—or perhaps more accurately, project—certain phonotactic generalizations by taking a free-ride on surface-true rules.5 But note: I have not argued that the phonotactic hypothesis is correct. Rather, I have simply provided a way to derive some phonotactic generalizations using entrenched grammatical machinery (i.e., phonological alternations). And this can only account for a subset of possible phonotactic generalizations.

Let us consider the language with word-initial affricates again. Linguists are often heard to say that one needs to posit phonotactic generalizations to “rule out” consonant clusters in this language. I disagree. Imagine that we have two grammars, G and G’. G has a set of URs, which includes contour phoneme affricates (/t͡ɬakaʔ-/ ‘people’, /t͡sopelik-/ ‘sweet’, etc., where the IPA tie bar symbolizes contour phonemes) but no consonant clusters. G also has a surface constraint on consonant clusters other than the affricates (which can be assumed to be contour phonemes, for sake of simplicity). G’ has the same set of URs, but lacks the surface constraint. Is there any reason to prefer G over G’? With the evidence given so far, I submit that there is not. Of course, there might be some grammatical patterns which, if otherwise unconstrained, would produce consonant clusters, in which case the phonotactic constraint of G may have some work to do. And, there may additional facts (perhaps the adaptation of loanwords, or wordlikeness judgments, though these data are not applied to this problem without making additional strong assumptions) may also militate in favor of G. But rarely if ever are these additional facts presented when positing G’. Now let us consider a third grammar, G”. This grammar is the same as G’, except that the affricates are now represented as consonant clusters (/tɬakaʔ-/ ‘people’, /tsopelik-/ ‘sweet’, etc.) rather than contour phonemes. Is there any reason to prefer either G’ or G” given the facts available to us thus far? It seems to me there is not.

This is a minor scandal for phonemic analysis. But it is not a purely philosophical issue: it is the same issue that children acquiring Nahuatl face. “Phonotacticians” have largely sidestepped these issues by making a completely implicit assumption that grammars (or perhaps, language learners) abhor a vacuum, in the sense that phonotactic constraints need to be posited to rule out that which does not occur. The problem is that there is often no reason to think these things would occur in the first place. If we assume that grammars do not abhor a vacuum—allowing us to rid ourselves of the increasingly complex machinery used to encode phonotactic generalizations not derived from alternations—we obtain exactly the same results in the vast majority of cases.

Endnotes

  1. One language with this property is Classical Nahuatl.
  2. Whatever that means! It’s not immediately clear, since there does not seem to be a fully-articulated theory that explains what it means to be a single segment in underlying representation to correspond to multiple articulatory targets on the surface. Without such a theory this feels like mere phenomenological description.
  3. Recently, Gouskova & Stanton (2021) express this heuristic, which has antecedents going back to at least Trubetzkoy, as a simple computational model.
  4. One language which supposedly has this property is Gurindji (McConvell 1988), though I only have only seen the relevant data reprinted in secondary sources. Thanks to Andrew Lamont (p.c.) for drawing my attention to this data. Note that in this language, the nasal-obstruent clusters undergo dissimilation when preceded by another nasal-obstruent cluster, which might—under certain assumptions—be a further argument that nasal-obstruent sequences are really clusters.
  5. See also Gorman 2013, particularly chapters 3-4.

References

Gorman, K. 2013. Generative phonotactics. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Gouskova, M. and Stanton, J. 2021. Learning complex segments. Language 97(1): 151-193.
McConvell, P. 1988. Nasal cluster dissimilation and constraints on phonological variables in Gurundji and related languages. Aboriginal Linguistics 1: 135-165.

On the past tense debate; Part 1: the RAWD approach

I have not had time to blog in a while, and I really don’t have much time now either. But here is a quick note (one of several, I anticipate) about the past tense debate.

It is common to talk as if connectionist approaches and dual-route models are the two opposing approaches to morphological irregularity, when in fact there are three approaches. Linguists since at least Bloch (1947)1 have claimed that regular, irregular, and semiregular patterns are all rule-governed and ontologically alike. Of course, the irregular and semiregular rules may require some degree lexical conditioning, but phonologists have rightly never seen this as some kind of defect or scandal. Chomsky & Halle (1968), Halle (1977), Rubach (1984), and Halle & Mohanan (1985) all spend quite a bit of space developing these rules, using formalisms that should be accessible to any modern-day student of phonology. These rules all the way down (henceforth RAWD) approaches are empirically adequate and have been implemented computationally with great success: some prominent instances include Yip & Sussman 1996, Albright & Hayes 2003,2 and Payne 2022. It is malpractice to ignore these approaches.

One might think that RAWD has more in common with dual-route approaches than with connectionist thinking, but as Mark Liberman noted many years ago, that is not obviously the case. Mark Seidenberg, for instance, one of the most prominent Old Connectionists, has argued that there is a tendency for regulars and irregulars to share certain structural similarities. To take one example, semi-regular slept does not look so different from stepped, and the many zero past tense forms (e.g., hit, bid) end in the same phones—[t, d]—used to mark the plural. While I am not sure this is a meaningfuly generalization, it clearly is something that both connectionist and RAWD models can encode.3 This is in contradistinction to dual-route models, which have no choice but to treat these observations as coincidences. Thus, as Mark notes, connectionists and RAWD proponents find themselves allied against dual-route models.

(Mark’s post, which I recommend, continues to draw a parallel between dual-routism and bi-uniqueness which will amuse anyone interested in the history of phonology.)

Endnotes

  1. This is not exactly obscure work: Bloch taught at two Ivies and was later the president of the LSA. 
  2. To be fair, Albright & Hayes’s model does a rather poor job recapitulating the training data, though as they argue, it generalizes nonce words in a way consistent with human behavior.
  3. For instance, one might propose that slept is exceptionally subject to a vowel shortening rule of the sort proposed by Myers (1987) but otherwise regular.

References

Albright, A. and Hayes, B. 2003. Rules vs. analogy in English past tenses: a computational/experimental study. Cognition 90(2): 119-161.
Bloch, B. 1947. English verb inflection. Language 23(4): 399-418.
Chomsky, N., and Halle, M. 1968. Sound Pattern of English. Harper & Row.
Halle, M. 1977. Tenseness, vowel shift and the phonology of back vowels in Modern English. Linguistic Inquiry 8(4): 611-625.
Halle, M., and Mohanan, K. P. 1985. Segmental phonology of Modern English. Linguistic Inquiry 16(1): 57-116.
Myers, S. 1987. Vowel shortening in English. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 5(4): 485-518.
Payne, S. R. 2022. When collisions are a good thing: the acquisition of morphological marking. Bachelor’s thesis, University of Pennsylvania. 
Pinker, S. 1999. Words and Rules: the Ingredients of Language. Basic Books.
Rubach, J. 1984. Segmental rules of English and cyclic phonology. Language 60(1): 21-54.
Yip, K., and Sussman, G. J. 1997. Sparse representations for fast, one-shot learning. In Proceedings of the 14th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and 9th Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, pages 521-527.

The Wordlikeness Project

We (myself, Karthik Durvasula, and Jimin Kahng) recently got the good news that our NSF collaborative research proposal has been funded. This works springs ultimately from my dissertation. There I argue—using a mix of logical argumentation and “archival” wordlikeness data mostly taken from appendices of previously published work—that the view of phonotactic grammar as statistical patterns or constraints projected from the lexicon is not strongly supported by the available data. My conclusions are perhaps weakened by the low overall quality of this archival data, which is drawn from various stimulus presentation modalities (i.e., auditory vs. orthographic) and response modalities (Likert scale vs. binary forced-choice vs. transcription). In the NSF study, we will be collecting wordlikeness data in English and Korean, manipluating these stimulus presentation and response modalities, and this data will be made publicly available under the name of the Wordlikeness Project. (Here we draw inspiration from the English Lexicon Project and spinoffs.) We will also be using this data for extensive computational modeling, to answer some of the questions raised in my dissertation and in Karthik and Jimin’s subsequent work.

The next toolkit 2: electric boogaloo

I just got back from the excellent Workshop on Model Theoretic Representations in Phonology. While I am not exactly a member of the “Delaware school”, i.e., the model-theoretic phonology (MTP) crowd, I am a big fan. In my talk, I contrasted the model-theoretic approach to an approach I called the black box approach, using neural networks and program synthesis solvers as examples of the latter. I likened the two styles to neat vs. scruffy, better is better vs. worse is better, rationalists vs. empiricists, and cowboys vs. aliens.

One lesson I drew from this comparison is the need for MTPists to develop high-quality software—the next toolkit 2. I didn’t say much during my talk about what I imagine this to be like, so I thought I’d leave my thoughts here. Several people—Alëna Aksënova, Hossep Dolatian, and Dakotah Lambert, for example—have developed interesting MTP-oriented libraries. While I do not want to give short schrift to their work, I think there are two useful models for the the next next toolkit: (my own) Pynini and PyTorch. Here is what I see as the key features:

  1. They are ordinary Python on the front-end. Of course, both have a C++ back-end, and PyTorch has a rarely used C++  API, but that’s purely a matter of performance; both have been slowly moving Python code into the C++ layer over the course of their development.The fact of the matter is that in 2022, just about anyone who can code at all can do so in Python.
  2. While both are devilishly complex, their design follows the principle of least suprise; there is only a bit of what Pythonistas call exhuberant syntax (Pynini’s use of the @ operator, PyTorch’s use of _ to denote in-place methods).
  3. They have extensive documentation (both in-module and up to book length).
  4. They have extensive test suites.
  5. They are properly packaged and can be installed via PyPi (i.e., via pip) or Conda-Forge (via conda).
  6. They have corporate backing.

I understand that many in the MTP community are naturally—constitutionally, even—drawn to functional languages and literate programming. I think this should not be the initial focus. It should be ease of use, and for that it is hard to beat ordinary Python in 2022. Jupyter/Colab support is a great idea, though, and might satisfy the literate programming itch too.

Defectivity in Greek

[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies.]

Sims (2006: ch. 4, henceforth just S) documents gaps in the genitive plural (gen.pl.) forms of modern Greek nouns. These gaps appear to be reasonably well known and quite common: S’s primary data comes from two Greek dictionaries published in the 1990s. The LNEG dictionary contains over 1,600 nouns defective in the gen.pl.; the LKN over 1,300.1 If this is even remotely close to correct, this is still probably the most extensive  case of defectivity, in terms of affected lexemes, documented in any language. Interestingly, S notes that there is “surprisingly little agreement between the two dictionaries about which lexemes are defective in the genitive plural” (S: 81, fn. 54), with the two dictionaries agreeing on 470 nouns.

Modern Greek declines nouns for four cases and two numbers. The primary gen.pl. marker, written -ων (-on) may or many not trigger rightward shift of primary stress, depending on the noun. Pappús ‘grandfather’ has no gen.pl. stress shift (pappúdon), whereas náftis ‘sailor’ and ónoma ‘name’ do (naftón, onomáton).2 There does not seem to be much—except etymology—which predicts whether or not a noun will shift. S suggests that there is an important distinction between nouns which already have final stress in the nom.sg., and others which have stress on earlier syllables in the nom.sg., as the former, represented by pappús and referred to by S as “type 1” and “columnar stress” nouns, never have stress shift in the gen.pl., and do not exhibit gen.pl. gaps.3 Assuming this is correct, all that remains is to understand why there is no productive default in the non-“type 1” declensional classes.

There are several other things going on here that are not yet well understood. First, modern Greek is in some sense diglossic, and more specifically pluricentric, with vernacular and learned registers (known as dimotiki and katharevousa, respectively) existing alongside various divergent dialects. One might be tempted to suggest that this would result in heightened awareness of lexical variation in gen.pl. stress shift. Second, S notes that the genitive itself is in competition with a periphrastic alternative that uses a preposition governing the accusative case (S: 86f.). According to S, the periphrastic accusative is associated with dimotiki and the genitive with katharevousa. Since katharevousa is itself reasonably artificial, colloquial use of the genitive may be increasingly moribund. Third, the LNK dictionary also lists quite a few nouns are defective in other plural forms as well. These have received little attention; some are probably  singularia tantum (see, e.g., Sims 2015: 150) but perhaps something else is going on too.

Most of the points made by S in her 2006 dissertation are echoed in her 2015 monograph. I have little to say about her idea that defectivity is encoded via implicational hierarchies in the morphological paradigms, and I didn’t find the experimental results informative.

Endnotes

  1. See S (ibid.) for these citations. I have briefly consulted both works in print, just to spot check S’s coding. Since I found no major issues, I am instead working from tables in S’s appendices. Thanks to Lucas Ashby for help digitizing these.
  2. I have taken the liberty of standardizing S’s transliterations somewhat.
  3. It is hard to tell whether S thinks this is a synchronic explanation for defectivity. Elsewhere, S (ch. 5) claims that defectivity is grammaticalized (or perhaps lexicalized) by essentially having the morphological module return some kind of “null” for defective combinations, so that there is no need for further synchronic motivation. S seems to consider this a desirable conclusion.

References

Sims, A. 2006. Minding the gap: Inflectional defectiveness in a paradigmatic theory. Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University.
Sims, A. 2015. Inflectional Defectiveness. Cambridge University Press.

Defectivity in Russian; part 2: nouns

[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies.]

Pertsova (2005, henceforth P) describes defectivity in the genitive plural (henceforth, gen.pl.) of Russian nouns. This defectivity is not quite as extensive as in the verbs: Zaliznyak’s (1977) renowned morphological dictionary, Pertsova’s primary source, labels roughly forty noun lexemes as Р.мн. затрудн. ‘gen.pl. difficult’ (P gives this as ‘awkward’), and a smaller number are labeled Р.мн. нет ‘gen.pl. does not exist’. Pre-theoretically, the Russian gen.pl. form has three complexities. First, there are three (surface) gen.pl. suffixes: -ej, -ov, and a null -∅ (though this is often taken to be the surface form of a back yer; e.g., Bailyn & Nevins 2008). Secondly, stress may either fall on the stem or the desinence, depending on a number of factors. First, the fleeting vowels found in many Slavic languages, sometimes surface in the final syllable of the stem of null gen.pl. forms; e.g., kiška ‘gut’ has a gen.pl kišok.

Let us consider the ‘do not exist’ cases first. A few examples are dno ‘bottom’, mgla ‘haze’, and mzda, an archaic word meaning ‘bribe’. All three of these are built from stems consisting solely of consonants—the -o and -a are nom.sg. affixes—and according to P, we would expect them to form a null gen.pl.1 Were they do so, then, the gen.pl. form would be a purely consonantal sequence (*dn, *mgl, *mzd, etc.). While Russian allows quite rich onsets, it does not permit vowel-less prosodic words. So, presumably, these ‘do not exist’ cases are in some sense derived, but are unpronounceable.

The cases labeled by Zaliznyak as ‘difficult’ are perhaps more challenging. These include fata ‘veil’, yula ‘weasel’, and suma ‘bag, pouch’. Many of these (e.g., čalma ‘turban’, taxta ‘ottoman’, mulla ‘mullah’) are borrowings from Tatar or other Turkic languages. All forty ‘difficult’ nouns are all feminines in -a, and all of them have desinential stress (i.e., stress on the case/number suffix) throughout. According to P, these ‘difficult’ nouns would all have a null gen.pl. were it not ineffable. This means that stem stress is the only option (because duh, there’s no way to stress a null desinence). Yet speakers are reluctant to introduce a new, stem-stressed allomorph of the stem that does not otherwise exhibit stem stress, because of a principle known as lexical conservatism.

I follow this basic logic, but I am not sure how to make the lexical conservatism filter into something mechanistic and appropriately parameterized so that it can actually predict the data we observe. P points out that there are other nouns which have exactly the same properties (null gen.pl., desinential stress) but resolve this conflict by retracting stress to the final syllable of the stem. For example, borodá ‘beard’ has a null, stem-stressed, but unobjectionable gen.pl. boród, as does the previously mentioned kišká/kišók.2 After considering and rejecting an appeal to frequency, P suggests that there is something special about monosyllabic stems that makes them more resistent to stem allomorphy. The problems do not end here, because as P gamely points out, the gen.pl. is not the only case/number combination which forces stress retraction; it also happens in the null nom.sg. of masculines like stol ‘table’, but I am aware of any Russian nouns which are defective in the nom.sg.

While I find P’s description clear, I do not think her analysis works. It correctly identifies two interesting explananda—the fact that gaps are localized to monosyllabic stems, and to the genitive plurals—but gives little explanation for these facts. And the invocation of lexical conservatism, never that well-defined in the first place, has done little to help; it could just as well be that the conflict between desinential stress and the selection of a null gen.pl. produces ineffability. Lexical conservatism actually prevents us from uniting the ‘does not exist’ and the ‘difficult’ cases, which after all both involve monosyllabic stems expected to exhibit desinential stress and a null gen.pl.3

Sims (2015) notes that these defective nouns might be an interesting case for studying the interaction between defectivity and syncretism, a topic first discussed by Stump (2010). In Russian there is syncretism between gen.pl. and accusative plural (acc.pl.) forms for all animate nouns. Since twelve of the defective nouns are animates, this  means that either there is an exception to this syncretism (in the case that the acc.pl. is acceptable) or perhaps, the defectivity itself is carried over by the syncretism and nouns are defective in the acc.pl. too. No one seems to have gathered the relevant judgments  about the well-formedness of these animates in their gen.pl. vs. acc.pl. forms yet.

Postscript

As is also the case for Russian verbs, defectivity in Russian nouns has arguably risen to the level of conscious awareness among Russophones. In his short story Kocherga, the Soviet humorist Mikhail Zoshchenko tells of workers who wish to order five more fire pokers for their drafty office. The nom.sg. kocherga ‘fire poker’, is unobjectionable, but no one they talk to is sure what the gen.pl., the case used for five or more of an object in a quantified noun phrase like ‘five fire pokers’, ought to be, and both they and their interlocutors use clever circumlocutions to dodge the question.

Endnotes

  1. I note that Wiktionary gives the gen.pl. of dno as don’ev, with a back stem yer  surfacing (also bearing stress) and the -ev gen.pl. suffix. If this is correct, this is a problem for P’s claim that stems of this class are expected to have a null gen.pl., unless there is some other reason dno to behaves differently than mgla or mzda.
  2. Here I am using acute accents to indicate stress, as is common practice in (anglophone) Russian linguistics.
  3. I am loathe to assign grammatical distinctions to informal gradations of unacceptability, so I see no incentive to distinguish these cases.

References

Bailyn, J. F. and Nevins, A. 2008. Russian genitive plurals are impostors. In A. Bachrach and A. Nevins (ed.), Inflectional Identity, pages 237-270. Oxford University Press.
Pertsova, K. 2005. How lexical conservatism can lead to paradigm gaps. UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics 11: 13-30.
Sims, A. 2015. Inflectional Defectiveness. Cambridge University Press.
Stump, G. 2010. Interactions between defectiveness and syncretism. In M. Baerman, G. G. Corbett, and D. Brown (ed.), Defective Paradigms: Missing Forms and What They Tell Us, pages 181-210. Oxford University Press.
Zaliznyak, A. A. 1977. Grammatičeskij slovar’ russkogo jazyka. Moskva.

Defectivity in Russian; part 1: verbs

[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies.]

The earliest discussion of defectivity within the generativist tradition can be found in an early paper by Halle (1973:7f.).

…one finds various kinds of defective paradigms in the inflection. For instance, in Russian there are about 100 verbs (all, incidentally, belonging to the so-called “second conjugation”) which lack first person singular forms of the nonpast tense. Russian grammar books frequently note that such forms as (8) “do not exist” or “are not used”, or “are avoided.”

(8)
*lažu ‘I climb’
*pobežu (or *pobeždu) ‘I conquer’
*deržu ‘I talk rudely’
*muču ‘I stir up’
*erunžu ‘I behave foolishly’

Subsequent work slightly lowers Halle’s estimate of 100 verbs. By combining evidence from Russian morphological dictionaries, Sims (2006) provides a list of 70 defective verbs, and Pertsova (2016) further refines Sims’ list to 63. But by any account, defectivity affects many more verb types than, for example, in the English verbs.

All of the defective verbs end in a dental consonant—s, z, t, or d—and belong to the second conjugation, in which verbs form infinitives in -et’ or -it’), and are defective only in the 1sg. non-past form, marked with a –u and a mutation of the stem-final dental.

Baerman (2008) provides a detailed history of the mutations of t and d. The modern mutations, to š and ž respectively, represent the expected Russian reflexes of Common Slavic *tʲ, *dʲ, respectively. Christianization, beginning at the close of the first millennium, brought about a period of substantial contact with southern Slavic speakers, and their liturgical language, Old Church Slavonic (OCS), contributed novel reflexes of *tʲ, *dʲ, namely č [tʃʲ] and žd [ʐd] . The OCS reflexes were found in, among other contexts, the 1sg. non-past—where they competed with the native mutations—and the past passive participle, where they were largely entrenched. Ultimately, č persisted in the 1sg. non-past but žd was driven out sometime in the early 20th century (ibid., 85). However, the latter persists in past passive participles (e.g., rodit’ ‘to give birth’ has the past passive participle roždënnyj).1 The OCS affricate mutations are rarely found in contemporarily written Russian. However, Gorman & Yang (2019; henceforth G&K) cite some weak evidence that the OCS mutation has some synchronic purchase in the minds of Russian speakers. First, Sims (2006) administers a cloze task in which Russian speakers are asked to produce the 1sg. non-past of a defective verb shown in the infinitive (e.g., ubedit’ ‘to convince’) and several participants select the OCS-like ubeždu, which is proscribed. Secondly, Slioussar and Kholodilova (2013), Pertsova (2016), and Spektor (2021) catalog what happens when verbs borrowed from English end in a dental consonant. For instance, from the English friend comes zafrendit’ ‘to add s.o. to one’s friend list on social media and rasfrendit’ ‘to unfriend s.o. on social media’, and among the many options, they find instances of the OCS-like zafrenždu in addition to the expected zafrenžu. To add to the confusion, there there is some hesitation on the part of Russian speakers to apply either of the expected 1sg. non-past mutations, and some speakers produce the the unexpected, unmutated zafrendu.2 There is no precedent for this among native Russian verb lexemes.

The mutations of s and z to š and ž, respectfully, have no competitor inherited from contact with OCS. These mutations occur across the board. However, that’s not quite the whole story: English borrowings in the Slioussar and Kholodilova corpus often fail to alternate. For instance, for fiksit’ ‘to fix s.t.’, they record both the expected fikšu as well as the unexpected, unmutated fiksu. 

G&K develop an account of the Russian verbal gaps which assume that each of these four dental consonants does have a synchronically active competitor, and that there is simply no default. They couch this in terms of the Yang’s Tolerance Principle, but even one rejecting that particular method of deciding what is and is not productive might still agree with the basic insight—as indicated by English dental-stem loanwords—that the dental mutations are no longer productive and that this lack of productivity, along with sparse data during acquisition, results in defectivity.

Other accounts of this phenomena can be found in ch. 7 of Sims 2015 and in Pertsova 2016. These two studies contain many interesting suggestions for future work. However, with respect I must say I am not sure how to operationalize their suggestions as part of a mechanistic account of these observations.

Postscript

The aforementioned defectivity is the subject of occasional humor among Russian speakers. For instance, as discussed by as discussed by Sims (2015:5), a Russian translation of one of Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories has the anthropomorphic bear puzzling over the 1sg. of pobedit‘ ‘to be victorious’. This suggests that Russian verbal defectivity has risen to the level of consciousness, and may reflect sociolinguistic “change from above”.

Endnotes

  1. This form was cited in G&K:186; I have taken the liberty of fixing an inconsistency in the transliteration: there рождённый was transliterated as roždënny (note the missing final glide).
  2. Russian has many indeclinable nouns, nouns which do not bear the ordinary case-number suffixes (Wade 2020:§36-40). For instance, radio ‘ibid.’ and VIČ ‘HIV’ can be used in any of the six cases and two numbers, but never bears any case-number suffixes. Crucially, though, indeclinables, unlike the aforementioned verbs, are either phonotactically-odd loanwords or acronyms, but as far as I can tell there is nothing phonotactically odd about zafrendit’ or its stem. And one should certainly not equate indeclinability and defectivity.

References

Baerman, M. 2008. Historical observations on defectiveness: The first singular non-past. Russian Linguistics 32: 81-97.
Gorman,. K. and Yang, C. 2019. When nobody wins. In F. Rainer, F. Gardani, H. C. Luschützky and W. U. Dressler (ed.), Competition in Inflection and Word Formation, pages 169-193. Springer.
Halle, M. 1973. Prolegomena to a theory of word formation. Linguistic Inquiry 4: 3-16.
Pertsova. 2016. Transderivational relations and paradigm gaps in Russian verbs.
Glossa 1: 13.
Sims, A. 2006. Minding the gap: Inflectional defectiveness in a paradigmatic theory. Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University.
Sims, A. 2015. Inflectional Defectiveness. Cambridge University Press.
Slioussar, N. and Kholodilova, M. 2011. Paradigm leveling in non-standard Russian. In
Proceedings of the 20th meeting of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics, pages 243-258.
Spektor, Y. 2021. Detection and morphological analysis of novel Russian
loanwords. Master’s thesis, Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Wade, T. 2020. A Comprehensive Russian Grammar. Wiley Blackwell, 4th edition.

Defectivity in Kinande

[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies.]

I have already written a bit about reduplication in Kinande; it too is an example of inflectional defectivity, and here I’ll focus on that fact.

In this language, most verbs participate in a form of reduplication with the semantics of roughly ‘to hurriedly V’ or ‘to repetitively V’. Mutaka & Hyman (1990; henceforth MH), argue that the reduplicant is a bisyllabic prefix. For instance, the reduplicated form of e-ri-gend-a ‘to leave’ is e-ri-gend-a-gend-a ‘to leave hurriedly’, with the reduplicant underlined. (In MH’s terms, e- is the “augment”, -ri the “prefix”, and -a is the “final vowel” morpheme.)

Certain verbal suffixes, known to Bantuists as extensions, may also be found in the reduplicant when the reduplicant would otherwise be less than bisyllabic. For instance, the passive suffix, underlyingly /-u-/, surfaces as [w] and is copied by reduplication. Thus for the verb root hum ‘beat’ the passive e-ri-hum-w-a reduplicates as e-ri-hum-w-a-hum-w-a. More interesting is there are “unproductive” (MH’s term) extensions.1 Verbs bearing these extensions rarely have a compositional semantic relationship with their unextended form (if an unextended verb stem exists at all). For instance, whereas luh-uk-a ‘take a rest’ may be semantically related to luh-a ‘be tired’, but there is no unextended *bát-a to go with bát-uk-a ‘move’.

Interesting things happen when we try to reduplicate unproductivity extended monosyllabic verb roots. For some such verbs, the extension is not reduplicated; e.g., e-rí-bang-uk-a ‘to jump about’ has a reduplicated form e-rí-bang-a-bang-uk-a. This is the same behavior found for “productive” extensions. For others, the extension is reduplicated, producing a trisyllabic—instead of the normal bisyllabic—reduplicant; e.g., e-ri-hurut-a ‘to snore’ has a reduplicated form e-ri-hur-ut-a-hur-ut-a. Finally, there are some stems—all monosyllabic verb roots with unproductive extensions—which do not undergo reduplication; e.g., e-rí-bug-ul-a ‘to find’ does not reduplicate and neither *e-rí-bug-a-bug-ul-a or *e-rí-bug-ul-a-bug-ul-a exist.

While one could imagine there are certain semantic restrictions on reduplication, like in Chaha, MH make no mention of such restrictions in Kinande. If possible, we should rule out this as a possible explanation for the aforementioned defectivity.

Endnotes

  1. I will segment these with hyphens though it may make sense to regard some unproductive extensions as part of morphologically simplex stems.

References

Mutaka, N. and Hyman, L. M. 1990. Syllables and morpheme integrity in Kinande reduplication. Phonology 7: 73-119.