Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2015, Page 80

nútímamáli. Ritgerð til M.A. prófs í íslenskri málfræði, Háskóla Íslands, Reykjavík.
[Varðveitt á www.skemman.is.]
Merchant, Jason. 2015. How Much Context is Enough? Two Cases of Span-conditioned
Stem Allomorphy. Linguistic Inquiry 46(2):273–303.
Valtýr Guðmundsson. 1922. Islandsk Grammatik. H. Hagerups Forlag, Kaupmannahöfn.
Wood, Jim. 2012. Icelandic Morphosyntax and Argument Structure. Doktorsritgerð, NYU,
New York.
summary
ʽThe adjacency constraint in Icelandic noun declensionʼ
Keywords: noun declension, contextual allomorphy, locality, linear adjacency, Distri -
buted Morphology, Icelandic
This paper discusses the hypothesis that conditions on contextual allomorphy require lin-
ear adjacency as formulated by Embick (2010) and carries out an empirical test of the pre-
dictions of this constraint in the declension of Icelandic nouns. The paper contrasts nouns
in which there is no overt nominalization morpheme with nouns which do contain such a
morpheme. Schematically, the two types of nouns can be described as root-nInfl vs. root-
n-nInfl where n stands for an overt nominalizer and nInfl for the nominal inflection mor-
pheme which expresses gender, case and number.
The adjacency constraint predicts that no root-conditioned allomorphy should be pos-
sible across an overt nominalizer. This means that despite evidence of root-specific declen-
sion patterns that must be memorized by speakers in the case of root-attached nInfl, there
should be no root-conditioned exceptions in the realization of nominalizer attached nInfl.
An empirical study was carried out on five distinct nominalizers in modern Icelandic using
the Database of Modern Icelandic Inflection. The findings support the adjacency con-
straint. All of the five suffixes are associated with one declension pattern each and every
word which has the same overt nominalizer has the exact same declension pattern. The
paper discusses the implications of these results for the study of linguistic variation and
change.
Anton Karl Ingason
Department of Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania
619 Williams Hall
255 S 36th Street, Philadelphia
PA 19104-6305, USA
ingason@ling.upenn.edu
Anton Karl Ingason80