Article: A non-universal approach to English inflectional morphology *.

Abstract

This paper proposes an analysis of the English plural and possessive within a declarative model of morphology called word design that employs unviolable constraints only to explain the well-formedness of regular forms. An advantage of this conception is that only those aspects of linguistic knowledge are shifted onto UG that are underdetermined by the linguistic input of language learners. The plural and the possessive, which have quite similar exponents on the surface, turn out to be subject to exactly the same two morphological conditions, with the only difference being the relevant base, namely the noun stem for the plural and the noun phrase for the ...

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