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Paradigmatic Chaos in Nuer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Matthew Baerman
Matthew Baerman*
Affiliation:
Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey
*
School of English and Languages, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey GU2 7XH, United Kingdom [m.baerman@surrey.ac.uk]
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Abstract

The case-number suffixes of the Western Nilotic language Nuer (Frank 1999) display a remarkable combination of formal simplicity and distributional complexity, which is manifested in: (i) a seemingly erratic form-function mapping that precludes attributing a consistent meaning to the suffixes, and (ii) a wealth of inflection classes only barely differentiated from each other. The suffixes looks as if they were rule-generated, but behave as if they were memorized. I advance a model of inflection combining principal parts, implicational rules, and default inheritance, in which the bulk of the complexity is attributed to the lexical stem, revealing the underlying systematicity behind suffix assignment.

Keywords

inflectionmorphologycomplexitysyncretisminflection classentropy

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 88 , Issue 3 , September 2012, pp. 467 - 494
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank those who have offered invaluable commentary on earlier versions of this article: Dunstan Brown, Patricia Cabredo-Hofherr, Marina Chumakina, Scott Collier, Greville Corbett, Enrique Palancar, Bert Remijsen, and Anna Thornton. I am particularly grateful to the five anonymous referees, and to Language associate editor Harald Baayen, whose many careful criticisms and suggestions have improved this work immensely. The work here was funded by the European Research Council (grant ERC-2008-AdG- 230268 MORPHOLOGY), whose support is gratefully acknowledged.

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