Paradigmatic Chaos in Nuer | Zendy

Matthew Baerman | Zendy

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Paradigmatic Chaos in Nuer

Author(s) -

Matthew Baerman

Publication year - 2012

Publication title -

language

Language(s) - English

Resource type - Journals

SCImago Journal Rank - 1.115

H-Index - 76

eISSN - 1535-0665

pISSN - 0097-8507

DOI - 10.1353/lan.2012.0065

Subject(s) - inflection , suffix , simplicity , linguistics , meaning (existential) , inheritance (genetic algorithm) , chaos (operating system) , function (biology) , principal (computer security) , computer science , mathematics , history , philosophy , epistemology , evolutionary biology , biochemistry , chemistry , computer security , biology , gene , operating system

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 them, 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 inheritence, which attributes the bulk of the complexity is attributed to the lexical stem, revealing the underlying systematicity behind suffix assignment

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