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Dvandvas, Blocking, and the Associative: The Bumpy Ride from Phrase to Word

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Paul Kiparsky
Paul Kiparsky*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
*
Stanford University Linguistics Department Stanford, CA 94306 [kiparsky@stanford.edu]
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Abstract

The oldest form of Sanskrit has a class of expressions that are in some respects like asyndetically coordinated syntactic phrases, in other respects like single compound words. I propose to resolve the conflicting evidence by drawing on prosodic phonology, stratal optimality theory, and the lexicalist approach to morphological blocking. I then present an account of the semantic properties and the historical development of these expressions. The analysis points to a solution to the theoretical problem of nonmonotonic trajectories in diachrony, a challenge for causal theories of change that claim that analogical processes are simplifying or regularizing. The idea is that optimization of such a highly structured object as a language does not proceed monotonically, but via a sequence of local optima.

Keywords

co-compoundslexicalizationVedic Sanskritprosodic phonologyassociativedual

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 86 , Issue 2 , June 2010, pp. 302 - 331
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 Linguistic Society of America

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