[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies.]

Sims (2006: ch. 4, henceforth just S) documents gaps in the genitive plural (gen.pl.) forms of modern Greek nouns. These gaps appear to be reasonably well known and quite common: S’s primary data comes from two Greek dictionaries published in the 1990s. The LNEG dictionary contains over 1,600 nouns defective in the gen.pl.; the LKN over 1,300.¹ If this is even remotely close to correct, this is still probably the most extensive  case of defectivity, in terms of affected lexemes, documented in any language. Interestingly, S notes that there is “surprisingly little agreement between the two dictionaries about which lexemes are defective in the genitive plural” (S: 81, fn. 54), with the two dictionaries agreeing on 470 nouns.

Modern Greek declines nouns for four cases and two numbers. The primary gen.pl. marker, written -ων (-on) may or many not trigger rightward shift of primary stress, depending on the noun. Pappús ‘grandfather’ has no gen.pl. stress shift (pappúdon), whereas náftis ‘sailor’ and ónoma ‘name’ do (naftón, onomáton).² There does not seem to be much—except etymology—which predicts whether or not a noun will shift. S suggests that there is an important distinction between nouns which already have final stress in the nom.sg., and others which have stress on earlier syllables in the nom.sg., as the former, represented by pappús and referred to by S as “type 1” and “columnar stress” nouns, never have stress shift in the gen.pl., and do not exhibit gen.pl. gaps.³ Assuming this is correct, all that remains is to understand why there is no productive default in the non-“type 1” declensional classes.

There are several other things going on here that are not yet well understood. First, modern Greek is in some sense diglossic, and more specifically pluricentric, with vernacular and learned registers (known as dimotiki and katharevousa, respectively) existing alongside various divergent dialects. One might be tempted to suggest that this would result in heightened awareness of lexical variation in gen.pl. stress shift. Second, S notes that the genitive itself is in competition with a periphrastic alternative that uses a preposition governing the accusative case (S: 86f.). According to S, the periphrastic accusative is associated with dimotiki and the genitive with katharevousa. Since katharevousa is itself reasonably artificial, colloquial use of the genitive may be increasingly moribund. Third, the LNK dictionary also lists quite a few nouns are defective in other plural forms as well. These have received little attention; some are probably  singularia tantum (see, e.g., Sims 2015: 150) but perhaps something else is going on too.

Most of the points made by S in her 2006 dissertation are echoed in her 2015 monograph. I have little to say about her idea that defectivity is encoded via implicational hierarchies in the morphological paradigms, and I didn’t find the experimental results informative.

Endnotes

1. See S (ibid.) for these citations. I have briefly consulted both works in print, just to spot check S’s coding. Since I found no major issues, I am instead working from tables in S’s appendices. Thanks to Lucas Ashby for help digitizing these.
2. I have taken the liberty of standardizing S’s transliterations somewhat.
3. It is hard to tell whether S thinks this is a synchronic explanation for defectivity. Elsewhere, S (ch. 5) claims that defectivity is grammaticalized (or perhaps lexicalized) by essentially having the morphological module return some kind of “null” for defective combinations, so that there is no need for further synchronic motivation. S seems to consider this a desirable conclusion.

References

Sims, A. 2006. Minding the gap: Inflectional defectiveness in a paradigmatic theory. Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University.
Sims, A. 2015. Inflectional Defectiveness. Cambridge University Press.

[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies.]

Pertsova (2005, henceforth P) describes defectivity in the genitive plural (henceforth, gen.pl.) of Russian nouns. This defectivity is not quite as extensive as in the verbs: Zaliznyak’s (1977) renowned morphological dictionary, Pertsova’s primary source, labels roughly forty noun lexemes as Р.мн. затрудн. ‘gen.pl. difficult’ (P gives this as ‘awkward’), and a smaller number are labeled Р.мн. нет ‘gen.pl. does not exist’. Pre-theoretically, the Russian gen.pl. form has three complexities. First, there are three (surface) gen.pl. suffixes: -ej, -ov, and a null -∅ (though this is often taken to be the surface form of a back yer; e.g., Bailyn & Nevins 2008). Secondly, stress may either fall on the stem or the desinence, depending on a number of factors. First, the fleeting vowels found in many Slavic languages, sometimes surface in the final syllable of the stem of null gen.pl. forms; e.g., kiška ‘gut’ has a gen.pl kišok.

Let us consider the ‘do not exist’ cases first. A few examples are dno ‘bottom’, mgla ‘haze’, and mzda, an archaic word meaning ‘bribe’. All three of these are built from stems consisting solely of consonants—the -o and -a are nom.sg. affixes—and according to P, we would expect them to form a null gen.pl.¹ Were they do so, then, the gen.pl. form would be a purely consonantal sequence (*dn, *mgl, *mzd, etc.). While Russian allows quite rich onsets, it does not permit vowel-less prosodic words. So, presumably, these ‘do not exist’ cases are in some sense derived, but are unpronounceable.

The cases labeled by Zaliznyak as ‘difficult’ are perhaps more challenging. These include fata ‘veil’, yula ‘weasel’, and suma ‘bag, pouch’. Many of these (e.g., čalma ‘turban’, taxta ‘ottoman’, mulla ‘mullah’) are borrowings from Tatar or other Turkic languages. All forty ‘difficult’ nouns are all feminines in -a, and all of them have desinential stress (i.e., stress on the case/number suffix) throughout. According to P, these ‘difficult’ nouns would all have a null gen.pl. were it not ineffable. This means that stem stress is the only option (because duh, there’s no way to stress a null desinence). Yet speakers are reluctant to introduce a new, stem-stressed allomorph of the stem that does not otherwise exhibit stem stress, because of a principle known as lexical conservatism.

I follow this basic logic, but I am not sure how to make the lexical conservatism filter into something mechanistic and appropriately parameterized so that it can actually predict the data we observe. P points out that there are other nouns which have exactly the same properties (null gen.pl., desinential stress) but resolve this conflict by retracting stress to the final syllable of the stem. For example, borodá ‘beard’ has a null, stem-stressed, but unobjectionable gen.pl. boród, as does the previously mentioned kišká/kišók.² After considering and rejecting an appeal to frequency, P suggests that there is something special about monosyllabic stems that makes them more resistent to stem allomorphy. The problems do not end here, because as P gamely points out, the gen.pl. is not the only case/number combination which forces stress retraction; it also happens in the null nom.sg. of masculines like stol ‘table’, but I am aware of any Russian nouns which are defective in the nom.sg.

While I find P’s description clear, I do not think her analysis works. It correctly identifies two interesting explananda—the fact that gaps are localized to monosyllabic stems, and to the genitive plurals—but gives little explanation for these facts. And the invocation of lexical conservatism, never that well-defined in the first place, has done little to help; it could just as well be that the conflict between desinential stress and the selection of a null gen.pl. produces ineffability. Lexical conservatism actually prevents us from uniting the ‘does not exist’ and the ‘difficult’ cases, which after all both involve monosyllabic stems expected to exhibit desinential stress and a null gen.pl.³

Sims (2015) notes that these defective nouns might be an interesting case for studying the interaction between defectivity and syncretism, a topic first discussed by Stump (2010). In Russian there is syncretism between gen.pl. and accusative plural (acc.pl.) forms for all animate nouns. Since twelve of the defective nouns are animates, this  means that either there is an exception to this syncretism (in the case that the acc.pl. is acceptable) or perhaps, the defectivity itself is carried over by the syncretism and nouns are defective in the acc.pl. too. No one seems to have gathered the relevant judgments  about the well-formedness of these animates in their gen.pl. vs. acc.pl. forms yet.

Postscript

As is also the case for Russian verbs, defectivity in Russian nouns has arguably risen to the level of conscious awareness among Russophones. In his short story Kocherga, the Soviet humorist Mikhail Zoshchenko tells of workers who wish to order five more fire pokers for their drafty office. The nom.sg. kocherga ‘fire poker’, is unobjectionable, but no one they talk to is sure what the gen.pl., the case used for five or more of an object in a quantified noun phrase like ‘five fire pokers’, ought to be, and both they and their interlocutors use clever circumlocutions to dodge the question.

Endnotes

1. I note that Wiktionary gives the gen.pl. of dno as don’ev, with a back stem yer  surfacing (also bearing stress) and the -ev gen.pl. suffix. If this is correct, this is a problem for P’s claim that stems of this class are expected to have a null gen.pl., unless there is some other reason dno to behaves differently than mgla or mzda.
2. Here I am using acute accents to indicate stress, as is common practice in (anglophone) Russian linguistics.
3. I am loathe to assign grammatical distinctions to informal gradations of unacceptability, so I see no incentive to distinguish these cases.

References

Bailyn, J. F. and Nevins, A. 2008. Russian genitive plurals are impostors. In A. Bachrach and A. Nevins (ed.), Inflectional Identity, pages 237-270. Oxford University Press.
Pertsova, K. 2005. How lexical conservatism can lead to paradigm gaps. UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics 11: 13-30.
Sims, A. 2015. Inflectional Defectiveness. Cambridge University Press.
Stump, G. 2010. Interactions between defectiveness and syncretism. In M. Baerman, G. G. Corbett, and D. Brown (ed.), Defective Paradigms: Missing Forms and What They Tell Us, pages 181-210. Oxford University Press.
Zaliznyak, A. A. 1977. Grammatičeskij slovar’ russkogo jazyka. Moskva.

[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies.]

The earliest discussion of defectivity within the generativist tradition can be found in an early paper by Halle (1973:7f.).

…one finds various kinds of defective paradigms in the inflection. For instance, in Russian there are about 100 verbs (all, incidentally, belonging to the so-called “second conjugation”) which lack first person singular forms of the nonpast tense. Russian grammar books frequently note that such forms as (8) “do not exist” or “are not used”, or “are avoided.”

(8)
*lažu ‘I climb’
*pobežu (or *pobeždu) ‘I conquer’
*deržu ‘I talk rudely’
*muču ‘I stir up’
*erunžu ‘I behave foolishly’

Subsequent work slightly lowers Halle’s estimate of 100 verbs. By combining evidence from Russian morphological dictionaries, Sims (2006) provides a list of 70 defective verbs, and Pertsova (2016) further refines Sims’ list to 63. But by any account, defectivity affects many more verb types than, for example, in the English verbs.

All of the defective verbs end in a dental consonant—s, z, t, or d—and belong to the second conjugation, in which verbs form infinitives in -et’ or -it’), and are defective only in the 1sg. non-past form, marked with a –u and a mutation of the stem-final dental.

Baerman (2008) provides a detailed history of the mutations of t and d. The modern mutations, to š and ž respectively, represent the expected Russian reflexes of Common Slavic *tʲ, *dʲ, respectively. Christianization, beginning at the close of the first millennium, brought about a period of substantial contact with southern Slavic speakers, and their liturgical language, Old Church Slavonic (OCS), contributed novel reflexes of *tʲ, *dʲ, namely č [tʃʲ] and žd [ʐd] . The OCS reflexes were found in, among other contexts, the 1sg. non-past—where they competed with the native mutations—and the past passive participle, where they were largely entrenched. Ultimately, č persisted in the 1sg. non-past but žd was driven out sometime in the early 20th century (ibid., 85). However, the latter persists in past passive participles (e.g., rodit’ ‘to give birth’ has the past passive participle roždënnyj).¹ The OCS affricate mutations are rarely found in contemporarily written Russian. However, Gorman & Yang (2019; henceforth G&K) cite some weak evidence that the OCS mutation has some synchronic purchase in the minds of Russian speakers. First, Sims (2006) administers a cloze task in which Russian speakers are asked to produce the 1sg. non-past of a defective verb shown in the infinitive (e.g., ubedit’ ‘to convince’) and several participants select the OCS-like ubeždu, which is proscribed. Secondly, Slioussar and Kholodilova (2013), Pertsova (2016), and Spektor (2021) catalog what happens when verbs borrowed from English end in a dental consonant. For instance, from the English friend comes zafrendit’ ‘to add s.o. to one’s friend list on social media and rasfrendit’ ‘to unfriend s.o. on social media’, and among the many options, they find instances of the OCS-like zafrenždu in addition to the expected zafrenžu. To add to the confusion, there there is some hesitation on the part of Russian speakers to apply either of the expected 1sg. non-past mutations, and some speakers produce the the unexpected, unmutated zafrendu.² There is no precedent for this among native Russian verb lexemes.

The mutations of s and z to š and ž, respectfully, have no competitor inherited from contact with OCS. These mutations occur across the board. However, that’s not quite the whole story: English borrowings in the Slioussar and Kholodilova corpus often fail to alternate. For instance, for fiksit’ ‘to fix s.t.’, they record both the expected fikšu as well as the unexpected, unmutated fiksu. 

G&K develop an account of the Russian verbal gaps which assume that each of these four dental consonants does have a synchronically active competitor, and that there is simply no default. They couch this in terms of the Yang’s Tolerance Principle, but even one rejecting that particular method of deciding what is and is not productive might still agree with the basic insight—as indicated by English dental-stem loanwords—that the dental mutations are no longer productive and that this lack of productivity, along with sparse data during acquisition, results in defectivity.

Other accounts of this phenomena can be found in ch. 7 of Sims 2015 and in Pertsova 2016. These two studies contain many interesting suggestions for future work. However, with respect I must say I am not sure how to operationalize their suggestions as part of a mechanistic account of these observations.

Postscript

The aforementioned defectivity is the subject of occasional humor among Russian speakers. For instance, as discussed by as discussed by Sims (2015:5), a Russian translation of one of Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories has the anthropomorphic bear puzzling over the 1sg. of pobedit‘ ‘to be victorious’. This suggests that Russian verbal defectivity has risen to the level of consciousness, and may reflect sociolinguistic “change from above”.

Endnotes

1. This form was cited in G&K:186; I have taken the liberty of fixing an inconsistency in the transliteration: there рождённый was transliterated as roždënny (note the missing final glide).
2. Russian has many indeclinable nouns, nouns which do not bear the ordinary case-number suffixes (Wade 2020:§36-40). For instance, radio ‘ibid.’ and VIČ ‘HIV’ can be used in any of the six cases and two numbers, but never bears any case-number suffixes. Crucially, though, indeclinables, unlike the aforementioned verbs, are either phonotactically-odd loanwords or acronyms, but as far as I can tell there is nothing phonotactically odd about zafrendit’ or its stem. And one should certainly not equate indeclinability and defectivity.

References

Baerman, M. 2008. Historical observations on defectiveness: The first singular non-past. Russian Linguistics 32: 81-97.
Gorman,. K. and Yang, C. 2019. When nobody wins. In F. Rainer, F. Gardani, H. C. Luschützky and W. U. Dressler (ed.), Competition in Inflection and Word Formation, pages 169-193. Springer.
Halle, M. 1973. Prolegomena to a theory of word formation. Linguistic Inquiry 4: 3-16.
Pertsova. 2016. Transderivational relations and paradigm gaps in Russian verbs.
Glossa 1: 13.
Sims, A. 2006. Minding the gap: Inflectional defectiveness in a paradigmatic theory. Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University.
Sims, A. 2015. Inflectional Defectiveness. Cambridge University Press.
Slioussar, N. and Kholodilova, M. 2011. Paradigm leveling in non-standard Russian. In
Proceedings of the 20th meeting of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics, pages 243-258.
Spektor, Y. 2021. Detection and morphological analysis of novel Russian
loanwords. Master’s thesis, Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Wade, T. 2020. A Comprehensive Russian Grammar. Wiley Blackwell, 4th edition.

[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies.]

I have already written a bit about reduplication in Kinande; it too is an example of inflectional defectivity, and here I’ll focus on that fact.

In this language, most verbs participate in a form of reduplication with the semantics of roughly ‘to hurriedly V’ or ‘to repetitively V’. Mutaka & Hyman (1990; henceforth MH), argue that the reduplicant is a bisyllabic prefix. For instance, the reduplicated form of e-ri-gend-a ‘to leave’ is e-ri-gend-a-gend-a ‘to leave hurriedly’, with the reduplicant underlined. (In MH’s terms, e- is the “augment”, -ri the “prefix”, and -a is the “final vowel” morpheme.)

Certain verbal suffixes, known to Bantuists as extensions, may also be found in the reduplicant when the reduplicant would otherwise be less than bisyllabic. For instance, the passive suffix, underlyingly /-u-/, surfaces as [w] and is copied by reduplication. Thus for the verb root hum ‘beat’ the passive e-ri-hum-w-a reduplicates as e-ri-hum-w-a-hum-w-a. More interesting is there are “unproductive” (MH’s term) extensions.¹ Verbs bearing these extensions rarely have a compositional semantic relationship with their unextended form (if an unextended verb stem exists at all). For instance, whereas luh-uk-a ‘take a rest’ may be semantically related to luh-a ‘be tired’, but there is no unextended *bát-a to go with bát-uk-a ‘move’.

Interesting things happen when we try to reduplicate unproductivity extended monosyllabic verb roots. For some such verbs, the extension is not reduplicated; e.g., e-rí-bang-uk-a ‘to jump about’ has a reduplicated form e-rí-bang-a-bang-uk-a. This is the same behavior found for “productive” extensions. For others, the extension is reduplicated, producing a trisyllabic—instead of the normal bisyllabic—reduplicant; e.g., e-ri-hurut-a ‘to snore’ has a reduplicated form e-ri-hur-ut-a-hur-ut-a. Finally, there are some stems—all monosyllabic verb roots with unproductive extensions—which do not undergo reduplication; e.g., e-rí-bug-ul-a ‘to find’ does not reduplicate and neither *e-rí-bug-a-bug-ul-a or *e-rí-bug-ul-a-bug-ul-a exist.

While one could imagine there are certain semantic restrictions on reduplication, like in Chaha, MH make no mention of such restrictions in Kinande. If possible, we should rule out this as a possible explanation for the aforementioned defectivity.

Endnotes

1. I will segment these with hyphens though it may make sense to regard some unproductive extensions as part of morphologically simplex stems.

References

Mutaka, N. and Hyman, L. M. 1990. Syllables and morpheme integrity in Kinande reduplication. Phonology 7: 73-119.