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All Things Morphology: Its independence and its interfaces
Edited by Sedigheh Moradi, Marcia Haag, Janie Rees-Miller and Andrija Petrovic
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 353] 2021
► pp. 81–98

Chapter 5
Leaving the stem by itself

ORCID logo | Université de Paris, LLF, CNRS
ORCID logo | University of Surrey, SMG

Stem allomorphy plays a central role in the recent history of morphology, in no small part thanks to a research program initiated by Aronoff (1994). Yet, there is no agreed upon way of deciding whether some bit of form should be considered a proper part of a stem allomorph or an independent exponent. We explore the possibility of just doing away with the notion of stem allomorphy in inflection. We use computational methods to identify within each word a sequence of strings that do not take part in any alternation within that word’s paradigm. We then discuss the relationship of such sequences to the classical notion of a stem, and argue that discontinuous stems are both conceptually and empirically more satisfactory.

Keywords: stems, allomorphy, exponence, alignment, European Portuguese, English, French
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The quest for stem allomorphy
  • 3.Automatic inference of stems
    • 3.1Alignment
    • 3.2Unique discontinuous stems
    • 3.3Sets of continuous stems
  • 4.How useful are continuous stem allomorphs?
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 25 August 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.353.05bon
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