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Where the grammar fails

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Robert Hetzron
Robert Hetzron*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Abstract

One sometimes finds gaps in the morphological systems of languages, such as the lack of a 1sg. non-past in certain Russian verbs. In some Arabic dialects, verbs with identical final radicals are defective: they lack forms where conflicts between rules would yield a phonetically uncomfortable configuration. For some Hungarian verbs in the ik-class which have a stem-final cluster, the grammar disallows epenthesis, so that these verbs lack the paradigms which would normally be formed by a consonantal suffix. However, though such defectiveness is often confined to individually specified words, Halle's extreme views of morphology (1973) cannot be accepted.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , December 1975 , pp. 859 - 872
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 Linguistic Society of America

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