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Trapped morphology and the rise of the Slavic definite adjective inflection: a reexamination

  • Florian Wandl ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: April 1, 2022
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Abstract

Slavic and Baltic show a curious way of overt definiteness marking by means of a specific type of adjective inflection. It arose when the adjective merged with a definiteness marker of pronominal origin. This paper aims at a comprehensive explanation of the rise of the definite adjective morphology in the former branch. First of all, it is argued that contrary to what has been claimed, there is no need to posit loss of trapped morphology to plausibly account for the definite adjective inflection. It can be explained by a series of well-established processes, i.e., sound change, reanalysis, and analogy. An interplay of these processes led to an increase in the phonological fusion of the adjective and the definiteness marker and ultimately resulted in their merger. In discussing the involved changes and in identifying factors that may have motivated them, the paper contributes to the general study of how new inflectional morphology emerges from the coalescence of two formerly independent elements.


Corresponding author: Florian Wandl, Department of Slavonic Languages and Literatures, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, E-mail:

Funding source: Swiss National Science Foundation

Award Identifier / Grant number: P1ZHP1_187851

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Andreas Hölzl, Florian Sommer, James Joshua Pennington, Rafał Szeptyński and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Moreover, I am indebted to Maria Napoli and the members of the editorial board of Folia Linguistica Historica for their helpful suggestions for improvement. Any remaining errors or omissions are my own.

  1. Research funding: Parts of this article have been elaborated during a research stay at the Department of Linguistics, University of Zagreb, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) (grant no. P1ZHP1_187851) which is gratefully acknowledged.

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Received: 2021-01-14
Accepted: 2021-05-06
Published Online: 2022-04-01
Published in Print: 2022-11-25

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