Morphological universals and tendencies

Identifying potential universals in morphology is a particular challenge. While contemporary theories of morphology rightly emphasize elements that indicate its status as a component of grammar in its own right, this also brings with it the important issue that there are languages with little or no autonomous morphology, limiting the scope of the term ‘universal’ to a subset of languages. This is one of the reasons why the term ‘tendency’ may be preferred. There is little evidence to support the view that affix order is determined by the same syntactic principles that determine word order. For practical reasons this chapter concentrates on inflectional morphology and argues that paradigmatic contrast is key for understanding general tendencies in morphology. In particular we look at claims about constraints on paradigm structure and consider approaches that see general tendencies in terms of morphology as a system. Diachronic data is used to illustrate this.