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

In an earlier post I listed some defective verbs in my idiolect. After talking with our PhD student Aidan Malanoski, I have a couple additional generalizations to note.

1. Aidan is fine with infinitival BEWARE (e.g., Caesar was told to beware the Ides of March). I am not sure about this myself. 
2. Aidan points out that SCRAM, SHOO, and GO AWAY (we might call them, along with BEWARE, “imperative-dominant verbs”) have a similarly restricted distribution. Roughly, our judgments are:

• imperatives ok: Scram! Shoo! Go away! 
• infinitives ok: Roaches started to scram when I turned the lights on. She shouted for the pigeons to shoo. The waiters couldn’t wait for them to go away. 
• gerunds marginal: Scramming would be a good idea right about now. Just going away might be the best thing.
• Other -ing participles degraded: (past continuous) Roaches started scramming when I turned the lights on. (small clause) I saw the police scramming. 
• Simple pasts degraded: Roaches scrammed when I turned the lights on. (compositional reading only) He went away.

They point out that same -ing surface forms may differ in acceptability. I also note that for me shooed [s.o.] away is fine as a transitive.

[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies. Hat tip to John Hutchinson for this valuable information.]

I am currently wrapping up a class at the LSA Institute class on defectivity, and as part of this class students presented case studies. Some of them students enriched case studies I have already presented in this defectivity blog series; the following new-to-me case was provided to us by John Hutchinson of the University of Surrey.

Defective verbs in Gaelic have been long noted, particularly by Dwelly (1911) and Maclaren (1935). They are something of a grab-bag. First, there are verbs with tense restrictions:

• The verb of quotation ars/orsa ‘said’ is restricted to past tense only.
• Where English has the adverb almost, Gaelic has theab, which selects a verb-noun complement (e.g., theab e fhéin a bhith marbh ‘he was almost dead’) and which is also restricted to past tense.
• The verb faod ‘may’ is non-past only.
• The verb feum ‘must’ is non-past only, though Hutchinson notes that past forms do occur in corpora.

There are also a number of verbs which occur only in the imperative (cf. my judgments about English beware):

• trothad/trobhad ‘come here’
• t(h)iugainn ‘come along’
• thalla ‘go away’
• siuthad ‘go on, fire away’
• feuch ‘behold’ (though note this is not defective in the sense of ‘show’)

Finally, Hutchinson notes that prepositions are inflected for person and number but eadar ‘between’ (naturally enough) only has plural forms. These cases of defectivity make a lot of semantic sense to me, particularly the restriction on the modal-like verbs and on ‘between’.

References

Dwelly, E. 1911. Illustrated Gaelic English Dictionary. Alex Maclaren & Sons.
Maclaren, J. 1935. Maclaren’s Gaelic Self-Taught, 4th edition. Alex Maclaren & Sons.

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

Morin (1987:33f.), cited in Boyé & Cabredo Hofherr (2010), draws attention to the French verb frire ‘to fry’. It is unobjectionable in the present active singular—je fris, tu fris, il frit—but apparently defective in the plural; according to my informants, speakers paraphrase this using inflected forms of faire frire ‘to make fried’. Arrivé (1987), also cited by Boyé & Cabredo Hofherr, lists frire and about a dozen other verbs as defective; according to my informants, all are rare, archaic, or unfamiliar.

Consider the case of frire briefly. It has an obvious analogical model: rire ‘to laugh’, which suggests *nous frions ‘we fry’, and so on. One obvious possibility is that this is somehow in competition with *nous frissons (cf. je finis/nous finissons ‘I/we finish’ and most 2nd conjugation verbs), which would give rise to a weird homophony with the plural of frisson ‘shiver; excitement’.¹

Endnotes

1. Here the ss appearing in the plural is ultimately descended from the Latin inchoative infix -sc- as seen in, e.g., nascō ‘I am born’. Neat, right?

References

Arrivé, M. 1997. La conjugaison pour tous. Hatier.
Boyé, G., and Cabredo Hofherr, P. 2010. Defectivity as stem suppletion in French and Spanish verbs. In Defective Paradigms: Missing Forms and What They Tell Us, ed. M. Baerman, G. G. Corbett, and D. Brown, 35–52. Oxford University Press.
Morin, Y.-C. 1987. Remarques sur l’organisation de la flexion des verbes français. ITL Review of Applied Linguistics 77-78: 13-91.

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

Thanks to correspondence with one of the authors I recently became aware of another possible paradigm gap in Turkish. According to İleri & Demirok (2022), henceforth ID, Turkish speakers are uncertain about the form of 3rd person plural desideratives. In this language, desideratives are deverbal nominals which select for and agree with a genitive subject. The desiderative suffix is /-AsI-/, where the capital letters mark archiphonemes subject to root harmony, and the 3rd person plural (3pl;.) possessive agreement suffix is /-lArI/. However, according to ID’s survey, Turkish speakers rate 3pl. desideratives formed from the root plus /-AsI-lArI/ as quite poor, and 3pl. desideratives are exceeding rare in corpora, even compared to other desiderative forms.

ID relate this observation to something unexpected about the 3rd person singular (3sg.) desiderative. Desideratives select, and agree with, a genitive subject, and the ordinary 3sg. genitive agreement suffix is /-sI/, but the 3sg. desiderative, there is apparently a haplology and we get just /-AsI/ (e.g., yapası, the 3sg. desiderative of ‘do’) instead of the expected */-AsI-sI/. They suggest that speakers may have reanalyzed /-AsI/ as a desiderative allomorph /-A/ followed by a 3sg. agreement suffix /-sI/, and thus predict that the 3pl. desiderative will be expressed by /-A-lArI/, though this is also judged to be quite bad (thus *yapasıları but also *yapaları). However, it is not immediately clear to me why ID expect speakers to hypothesize that the 3sg. desiderative allomorph should generalize to the 3pl.

This has a rather different flavor than the other defectivity case studies I’ve presented thus far. It could be that there simply are not enough desideratives in this person/number slot in the input, but I still don’t see what could be objectionable about /-AsI-lArI/. Another mystery is that their judgment task finds an unexplained very low acceptability for 2nd person plural desideratives (which seem to be of the form /-AsI-n/).

References

İleri, M. & Demirok, Ö. 2022. A paradigm gap in Turkish. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic 7, pages 1-15.

As of yesterday I have completed my series of defectivity case studies, at least for the time being. From these I propose the following tentative taxonomy:

• Pure allomorphic competition (including “stem change”, stress shift, etc.): English, Polish, Russian (1 2), Greek, Spanish, Hungarian
• Morpho-metrical constraints: Chaha, Kinande
• Morpho-phonotactic constraints: Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish

It is not clear to me whether three categories are really needed. In both of the latter two, here seems to be some tight phonotactic constraint on inflectional variants which results in ungrammaticality and defectivity if not satisfied. In the two cases from Africa, these constraints are of a metrical nature and impact many lexemes; in the cases from Scandinavia, they concern stem-final consonant clusters and possible mutations to them. And this looks a lot like the case of Russian verbs. This just leaves Tagalog, which I think has simply been misanalyzed, and Turkish, where the only defective lexemes are a handful of subminimal borrowings.

I am aware of two other cases of interest: (various stages of) Sanskrit (Stump 2010) and Latvian. These are phenomenologically quite different from the ones I’ve discussed so far: both involve gaps in the paradigms of inflected pronouns. I do not find gaps in the distribution of functional elements to be nearly as shocking as the failure of, say, an otherwise unobjectionable Russian or Spanish verb to have a 1sg. form. I should mention that the constraint against contracting n’t to am in standard English (see Yang 2017:§3 and references therein) is also possibly an example of this form; I suppose it depends on whether or not n’t is really an inflectional affix or not.

References

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.
Yang, C. 2017. How to wake up irregular (and speechless). In C. Bowern, L. Horn, and R. Zanuttini (ed.), On Looking into Words (and Beyond), pages 211-233. Language Science Press.

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

Hungarian verbs exhibit one of better-documented cases of defectivity, discussed first in English by Hetzron (1975). In particular, the study by Rebrus & Törkenczy (2009), henceforth RT, is a wealth of information, though this information is presented in so many different forms that it has taken me some effort to extract the basic generalizations. Furthermore, they seem to have deliberately avoided putting forth an actual analysis. Rather than trying to explain the data RT’s way I’ve tried to put matters into my own words. Note that below I often give multiple allomorphs for a suffix or epenthetic segment; these are conditioned by Hungarian’s well-known process of vowel harmony (see, e.g., Siptár & Törkenczy 2000 for description).

Hungarian has a class of verbs, mostly intransitive, which form a 3sg. indefinite present indicative in -ik rather than the ordinary null ending. Of these, some such verb stems end in surface consonant clusters. When consonant-initial suffixes (e.g., the imperative -j, the imperative subjunctive -d, the potential -hat/-het) are added to verb stems of this form, a fleeting vowel (o, ӧ, or e) normal breaks up the stem cluster (e.g., ugrik ‘s/he jumps’,  ugorhat ‘s/he may jump’). It is not clear to me whether this fleeting vowel is underlying or epenthetic, though it seems to be standard in Hungarian philology to assume the latter. However, for certain verbs, this does not occur and the verb is simply defective (e.g., csuklik ‘s/he hiccups’ but *csuklhat, *csukolhat). According to Hetzron  (ibid., 864f.)  all the defective verbs have stems of the form /…Cl/ or /…Cz/, though it is not the case that all verbs of this form are defective (e.g., vérzik ‘s/he bleeds’, vérezhet ‘s/he may bleed’; hajlik ‘s/he bends’, hajolhat ‘s/he may bend’). A study by Lukács, Rebrus, and Törkenczy (2010), conducted detailed grammaticality judgment tasks and appears to largely have confirmed the description given by Hetzron and RT.

What is the source of these patterns?  It may be that whatever causes the fleeting vowel to be epenthesized is less than fully productive; but then it is also necessary to also appeal to absolute phonotactic illformedness to derive the defectivity. It is not obvious that this will work either, because at least some of these clusters ought to simplify according to RT.

References

Hetzron, R. 1975. Where the grammar fails. Language 51: 859-872.
Lukács, Á., Rebrus, P., and Törkenczy, M. 2010. Defective verbal paradigms in Hungarian: description and experimental study. In M. Baerman, G. C. Corbett, and D. Brown (ed.), Defective Paradigms: Missing Forms and What They Tell Us, pages 85-102. Oxford University Press.
Rebrus, P., and Törkenczy, M. 2009. Covert and overt defectiveness in paradigms. In C. Rice and S. Blaho (ed)., When Nothing Wins: Modeling Ungrammaticality in OT, pages 195-234. Equinox.
Siptár, P., and Törkenczy, M. 2000. The Phonology of Hungarian. Oxford University Press.

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

Harris (1969:114) observes that the Spanish verbs agredir ‘to attack’ and aguerrir ‘to harden’ are defective in certain inflectional forms. Gorman & Yang (2019:180), consulting various Spanish dictionaries, expand this list to include abolir ‘to abolish’, arrecir(se) ‘to freeze’, aterir(se) ‘to freeze’, colorir ‘to color/dye’, descolorir ‘to discolor/bleach’, despavorir ‘to fear’, empedernir ‘to harden’, preterir ‘to ignore’, and tra(n)sgredir ‘to transgress’.

All of the defective Spanish verbs appeear to belong to the 3rd (-ir) conjugation, which is the smallest of the three and characterized by extensive irregularity. including raising and/or diphthongization of mid e, o to i, u and to ie, ue, respectively. For instance, the verb dormir ‘to sleep’ (along with the minimally different morir ‘to die’) undergoes diphthongization to ue when stress falls on the stem (e.g., duermo ‘I sleep’) and raising in various desinence-stressed forms (e.g., durmamos ‘we would sleep’). According to  Maiden & O’Neill (2010), it is exactly these forms which would show stem vowel changes which are defective (e.g., in the paradigm of abolir), though this claim ought to be verified with native speakers.

Harris has long argued that these stem changes are limited to stems bearing abstract phonemes. In his 1969 book, stems which undergo diphthongization bear an abstract feature +D; in his 1985 paper, a similar distinction between diphthongizing and non-alternating stem mid vowels is marked using moraic prespecification. The apparent raising of stem mid vowels is analyzed as a dissimilatory lowering of an underlying [+high] vowel, but since there are some stems which do not lower (e.g., vivir/vivo ‘to live/I live’), similar magic (i.e., abstract specifications) is likely called for. In contrast, I understand Bybee & Pardo (1981) and Albright et al. (2001) as arguing that these stem changes are locally predictable, conditioned by nearby segments.¹ Albright (2003) suggests that competition between these locally predictable conditioning factors is responsible for defectivity.

Gorman & Yang (2019) argue that, on the basis of a Tolerance Principle analysis, that there are no productive generalizations for 3rd conjugation mid vowel stem verbs in Spanish, if diphthongization and raising are viewed as competitors to a “no change” analysis.² In support of this, they note that children acquiring Spanish as their first language only very rarely produce incorrect stem changes in the 3rd conjugation. This suggests that during production, they may be “picking and choosing” verbs for which they have already acquired the relevant inflectional patterns.

Endnotes

1. Of course their arguments are largely limited to adult nonce word studies. I consider this inherently dubious for reasons discussed by Schütze (2005).
2. They claim “no change” is productive in both the 1st and 2nd conjugations. In support of this they note that diphthongization is commonly underapplied in these conjugations by children acquiring Spanish as their first language.

References

Albright, A., Andrade, A., and Hayes, B. 2001. Segmental environments of Spanish diphthongization. UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics 7: 117-151.
Albright, A. 2003. A quantitative study of Spanish paradigm gaps. In Proceedings of the 22th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, pages 1-14.
Bybee, J. L. and Pardo, E. 1981. On lexical and morphological conditioning of alternations: a nonce-prob e experiment with Spanish verbs. Linguistics 19: 937-968.
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.
Harris, J. W. 1969. Spanish Phonology. MIT Press.
Harris, J. W. 1985. Spanish diphthongisation and stress: a paradox resolved. Phonology 2: 31-45.
Maiden, M. and O’Neill, P. 2010. On morphomic defectiveness: evidence from the Romance languages of the Iberian peninsula. In M. Baerman, G. G. Corbett, and D. Brown (ed)., Defective Paradigms: Missing Forms and What They Tell Us, pages 103-124. Oxford University Press.
Schütze, C. 2005. Thinking about what we are asking speakers to do. In S. Kepser and M. Reis (ed.), Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical, and Computational Perspectives, pages 457-485. Mouton de Gruyter.