Morphosyntactic Patterns Follow Monotonic Mappings

摘要

Apart from being a system of structures, language is a system of relations. Understanding the particular regularities underlying these relations helps us predict both possibilities and gaps in linguistic organization. This paper follows Graf's work [13] in positing monotonic-ity as a substantial underlying restriction on possible patterns in morphosyntactic paradigms. This approach not only extends the notion of monotonicity outside semantics, but also combines this formal explanation with extralinguistic motivations. The tense hierarchy I propose for syncretism in verbal paradigms is independently motivated by Reichen-bach's tense system [22]. The gender hierarchy used for gender resolution rules is directly extracted from the organization of the linguistic data. The restriction on both types of paradigms is readily explained by the fact that they only allow monotonic mappings from a base hierarchy to output forms.