How to Live Naturally and not be Bothered by Economy
-
Livio Gaeta
Abstract
Markedness plays a central role within Natural Morphology and, more generally, in any functionalist approach to language. This is not intended to deny that other forces, more or less conflicting or competing with markedness, may also play a role in shaping a natural language. However, the main concern of this paper is that identifying naturalness, namely “what promotes the true nature of a thing”, amounts to grasping the teleology of (any module of) a language grammar. Concepts such as frequency or economy do not provide by themselves any deep insight into the essence of language, unless they are taken in the right perspective of being in a way symptoms of naturalness. In particular, economy must be related to markedness reduction in order to capture its role within the architecture of grammar.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Natural Morphology
- How to Live Naturally and not be Bothered by Economy
- Productivity of the Weak Verbs in Romanian
- On the Typology of Inflection Class Systems
- On Spanish Verb Inflection
- The Superstable Marker as an Indicator of Categorial Weakness?
- Case Before Gender in the Acquisition of German
- Crossing Form and Function: First and Second Person Plural Imperatives in the Dialect of Mesocco
- Lexical Blends: Functionally Tuning the Transparency of Complex Words
- Libri: Publications received — Publications reçues — Eingelaufene Literatur
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Natural Morphology
- How to Live Naturally and not be Bothered by Economy
- Productivity of the Weak Verbs in Romanian
- On the Typology of Inflection Class Systems
- On Spanish Verb Inflection
- The Superstable Marker as an Indicator of Categorial Weakness?
- Case Before Gender in the Acquisition of German
- Crossing Form and Function: First and Second Person Plural Imperatives in the Dialect of Mesocco
- Lexical Blends: Functionally Tuning the Transparency of Complex Words
- Libri: Publications received — Publications reçues — Eingelaufene Literatur
