ABSTRACT
So far, we have discussed paradigm economy in relation to material from a variety of languages, both Indo-European and non-Indo-European. But this discussion has 'had a piecemeal character; we have not so far confronted the Paradigm Economy Principle with the inflexional behaviour of an entire word-class in any language. In this chapter, we make good the deficiency by looking in some detail at modern standard German noun inflexion. In a sense, this choice of German is random; since the Paradigm Economy Principle is claimed to have universal validity, it is just as important to confront it with Georgian verbs or Estonian adjectives. But German noun inflexion has three advantages. Firstly, the facts are relatively accessible and well known. Secondly, they have been the subject of two thorough and lucid theoretical studies by Wurzel (1970; 1984), who addresses questions about paradigms which are independent of, and thus in a sense complement, those that we are concerned with here; 1 they have also been discussed (from a different point of view) by Lieber (1981). Thirdly (and most importantly), German nouns present at first sight quite a severe challenge to the Paradigm Economy Principle. As any secondlanguage learner of German will testify, distinct inflexional patterns seem numerous although the affixal resources involved are few. If we want to find solid counterevidence to the Principle, then, German noun inflexion seems a good place to search.
