The (in)compatibility of morpheme orders and lexical categories and its historical implications

Abstract

English testifies to a remarkable pattern of lexical gaps. In quite a few cases, particlestem nouns (e.g.the income) and adjectives (e.g.incoming) exist in the current language whereas their corresponding verbs (e.g.*to income) do not. Verbs with the opposite morpheme order (e.g.to come in) are, of course, attested. Since most relevant nouns and adjectives are derivatives of verbs, the word-class shift must either have entailed an inversion of the morphemes, or the verbs must have dropped out of the language. A diachronic analysis does indeed reveal that particle-stem verbs have a lower ‘life-expectancy’ than the corresponding nouns and adjectives. This difference is claimed to follow from differing degrees of compatibility between word classes and morpheme orders. The criterion of syntacticity shows particle-stem nouns and stem-particle verbs to be internally consistent but stem-particle nouns and particle-stem verbs to be inconsistent. This inconsistency gives rise to the observed historical instability of particle-stem verbs. While also disfavoured in this framework, the currency of stem-particle nouns (e.g.the handout) can be attributed to a conspiracy of several facilitatory effects which tend to override the arguments against this word type. The fact that linguistic units may fall into disuse necessitates certain revisions of the notion of optimality as the backbone of Optimality Theory.

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