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Preface of the guest-editor and former editor When resigning from my office as editor of Folia Linguistica, which I held from volume 15 (1981) to 39 (2005), I was asked to guest-edit this first semi-volume 40/1–2 of 2006. Therefore this introduction has a double function. The first is the deep-felt obligation of the former editor to thank all who have helped me in editing, first the previous and actual members of the editing board, most of all Oskar E. Pfeiffer (Vienna), who has been my alter ego for the whole period of my editorship, and without whose unfailing help and meticulous control of the editing process, I would have been unable to carry out my job. Next I have to thank, in chronological order, Mario Palaschke, Katharina Korecky-Kröll, and Markus A. Pöchtrager, who performed most of the computational work after the transferral of the production from Hungary (where first József Molnár and, after his death, Ferenc Kiefer had overseen it, both to be thanked as well) to Vienna. Many thanks are due to the readers who evaluated the manuscripts submitted, and, finally, to the Secretary/Treasurer Dieter Kastovsky (assisted by Christine Klein), and the members of the Societas Linguistica Europaea for their support. The second function is the guest-editor's duty to introduce the topic of the special issue on Natural Morphology, a field of research where I have been involved from its very beginning. This issue will illustrate some recent developments.

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.

This paper analyzes the productivity of weak verbs (1st conjugation with present in - ez and 4th conjugation with present in - esc ) in Romanian. The weak model originated in two derivational patterns common to all Romance languages, that developed into inflectional mechanisms only in some of them. Among its sister languages Romanian has exploited most intensively the weak inflection. It has been maintained that Modern Romanian has a single fully productive class, namely the 1st conjugation. However, there is no analysis that clearly distinguishes the productivity of the weak vs. the strong model in the 1st conjugation and that determines the domains of competition between the 1st and the 4th conjugation, which is also productive. This paper tries to fill this lacuna by a more accurate analysis of the productivity in the Romanian verb inflection. Based on an analysis of modern and historical data, and using also data from an experiment with nonce words, the conclusion is that Modern Romanian has two fully productive classes: weak verbs of the 1st conjugation and weak verbs of the 4th conjugation. The competition between these two classes seems to be governed by diaphasic and phonological criteria.

Inflectional classes are a property of the ideal inflecting-fusional language type. Thus strongly inflecting languages have the most complex vertical and horizontal stratification of hierarchical tree structures. Weakly inflecting languages which also approach the ideal isolating type or languages which also approach the agglutinating type have much shallower structures. Such properties follow from principles of Natural Morphology and from the distinction of the descendent hierarchy of macroclasses, classes, subclasses, subsubclasses etc. and homogeneous microclasses. The main languages of illustration are Latin, Lithuanian, Russian, German, French, Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish.

Introduction This contribution focuses on the third subtheory of Natural Morphology, language-specific system adequacy (cf. Wurzel 1984, Kilani-Schoch & Dressler 2005), particularly on the system-defining properties of Spanish verbs and their inflection class system. It follows the approach delineated in Dressler (2003a, b, cf. Kilani-Schoch & Dressler 2005).

In this article we examine and “exapt” Wurzel's concept of superstable markers in an innovative manner. We develop an extended view of superstability through a critical discussion of Wurzel's original definition and the status of marker-superstability versus allomorphy in Natural Morphology: As we understand it, superstability is – above and beyond a step towards uniformity – mainly a symptom for the weakening of the category affected (cf. 1., 2. and 4.). This view is exemplified in four short case studies on superstability in different grammatical categories of four Germanic languages: genitive case in Mainland Scandinavian and English (3.1), plural formation in Dutch (3.2), second person singular ending - st in German (3.3), and ablaut generalisation in Luxembourgish (3.4).

The paper discusses the acquisition of pronominal forms in German-speaking children. Main emphasis lies on the development of the form paradigms of definite pronouns and articles which are formally identical in German (except of the genitive forms which are not acquired in the early phase) and the functional content of the contrasting definite forms in early child grammar. On the base of an analysis of various types of overgeneralizations, it is argued here that children first acquire the lexico-semantic content related to definiteness, then functional features related to case distinctions and only later on functional features related to gender distinctions. On the contrary to previous investigations, the derived hypothesis is that a uniform case paradigm is the starting point in the acquisition of the paradigmatic relations. Gender, as a productive component of paradigm structure is realized by the child only later on. In general, the observed developments confirm assumptions of Natural Morphology and other functional theoretical concepts on the principles of paradigm organization.

This paper proposes an explanation for the rise and fall of a 1 pl imperative ending in the dialect of Mesocco, a Northern Italo-Romance variety from southern Switzerland. This ending cannot be explained with inherited 1 pl morphology: rather, it is best accounted for by assuming the reanalysis of a 2 pl imperative hosting a 1 sg pronominal object clitic. This reanalysis, it is suggested, must have occurred in the syntactic context provided by the ‘ethical’ dative construction. It has been prompted by several factors, among which the crucial one is functional in nature, viz. the pragmatic homology between 1 pl imperative – unmarkedly inclusive in meaning – and the ethical dative construction with a 2 pl imperative. Comparative evidence is also adduced from studies in linguistic typology, showing that similar crossovers between 1st and 2nd person plural morphology, although unattested in Romance (or, more precisely, in the better-known standard Romance languages), are not without parallels cross-linguistically. Finally, a functional motivation is provided for the deacquisition of this 1 pl imperative form in the dialect of the younger generations.

In this article, blending is defined as deliberate extragrammatical compounding. As such, it is distinct from non-deliberate creation such as contamination, from regular compounding, as well as from other extragrammatical morphological techniques such as shortening. For blending defined in this way, a typology is proposed according to the degree of transparency. This ranges from very transparent so-called “telescope blends”, such as Amtsschimmelpilz ‘red tape fungus’ < Amtsschimmel ‘red tape’ x Schimmelpilz ‘fungus’, to completely opaque “fragment blends”, such as Cujasuma < Cuba x Java x Sumatra (a brand of tobacco). This scale is tested on two corpuses of blends containing satirical blends and brand names, respectively. The satirical blends, whose effect depends to a large degree on their intelligibility, do, in fact, exhibit a higher preference for transparency than the brand names, for which transparency is functional to a certain degree only. This suggests the following conclusions: Language users have a very precise intuition for different degrees of transparency and are able to use this purposefully. Therefore, basing a typology of blends on transparency is more to the point than basing it on purely distributional features, as is commonly the case. Even in the diachronic perspective, the language users' intuition regarding phonological features ensuring the transparency of intricately complex words has been instrumental in shaping the strongly inflectional forms of NHG inflection and derivation implying vowel changes in addition to suffixation. It is this very intuition which underlies not only normal morphological competence, but also the extragrammatical competence which enables language users to develop and make creative use of extragrammatical techniques such as blending.

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