ABSTRACT
Mutations, like other agreement features in language, clearly have grammatical functions: and some of these were explored in Chapter 6.1 They are, thus, information-bearing, though often that information may be communicatively redundant. There are instances, however, where it seems that mutation has developed into the sole marker of certain grammatical or lexical information. It is these instances that we will term in this chapter the ‘semantic load’ of mutations. However, we do not intend to equate this term with an overall ‘functional load’ of the system, and we argued in Chapter 6 that it is this very functional load that is obscured by approaches that concentrate solely on formal analyses of mutation contexts.
