ABSTRACT
The aim of this book was to propose and defend certain generalisations about the relationship between morphosyntactic properties and their inflexional exponents. The search for such generalisations was expressed as a search for constraints on deviation from the ‘simplest’ one-to-one relationship observable in certain ‘agglutinating’ morphological patterns. Four principal generalisations have in fact been put forward: the Paradigm Economy Principle, the Macroparadigm Uniqueness Claim, the Systematic Homonymy Claim and the Peripherality Constraint. I have also mentioned other recent proposals which seem to bear on this topic: Bybee’s ‘relevance’, Wurzel’s ‘system congruity’, the Adjacency and Elsewhere Conditions, and Baker’s ‘Mirror Principle’.
