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Heteroclisis and Paradigm Linkage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Gregory T. Stump
Gregory T. Stump*
Affiliation:
University of Kentucky
*
Department of English, University of Kentucky, 1215 Patterson Office Tower, Lexington, KY 40506-0027, [gstump@uky.edu]
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Abstract

Heteroclisis is the property of a lexeme whose inflectional paradigm involves two or more distinct inflection classes. Although heteroclisis is widely observable, its implications for grammatical theory remain underexplored, perhaps because its canonical instances have the appearance of sporadic lexical exceptions. But heteroclisis cannot be assumed to lack any role in the definition of a language's morphology, since (i) it is sometimes highly systematic, involving whole classes of lexemes, and (ii) it obeys a universal constraint. These two facts show that heteroclisis is rule-governed. On the assumption that inflectional morphology involves a linkage of content-paradigms with form-paradigms (Stump 2002), heteroclisis can be seen as a kind of mismatch regulated by rules of paradigm linkage. Such rules account for the range of empirical phenomena subsumed by observations (i) and (ii).

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 82 , Issue 2 , June 2006, pp. 279 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 by Linguistic Society of America

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