Expecting the Unexpected: Exceptions in Grammar

✍ Scribed by Horst J. Simon (editor); Heike Wiese (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 460
• Series: Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM]; 216
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Every linguistic theory has to come to grips with a fundamental property of human language: the existence of exceptions, i.e. phenomena that do not follow the standard patterns one observes otherwise. The contributions to this volume discuss and exemplify a variety of approaches to exceptionality within different formal and non-formal frameworks.

Topics include criteria for exceptionality, the diachronic rise of exceptions, the relevance of different grammatical subsystems and their interaction in the explanation of exceptions, and the crucial characteristics of grammatical models that can accommodate exceptions. A special feature of the book is that the articles are accompanied by peer-commentaries and responses thereupon, thus opening up the papers to further discussion.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Preface
Introductory overview
What are exceptions? And what can be done about them?
Coming to grips with exceptions
Classical loci for exceptions: morphology and the lexicon
Exceptions to stress and harmony in Turkish: co-phonologies or prespecification?
Lexical exceptions as prespecification: some critical remarks
Feature spreading, lexical specification and truncation
Higher order exceptionality in inflectional morphology
An I-language view of morphological ‘exceptionality’: Comments on Corbett’s paper
Exceptions and what they tell us: reflections on Anderson’s comments
How do exceptions arise? On different paths to morphological irregularity
On the role of subregularities in the rise of exceptions
Statement on the commentary by Wolfgang U. Dressler
Taking into account interactions of grammatical sub-systems
Lexical variation in relativizer frequency
Corpus evidence and the role of probability estimates in processing decisions
Response to Kempson’s comments
Structured exceptions and case selection in Insular Scandinavian
Remarks on two kinds of exceptions: arbitrary vs. structured exceptions
Response to Susann Fischer
Loosening the strictness of grammar
Three approaches to exceptionality in syntactic typology
Remarks on three approaches to exceptionality in syntactic typology
A reply to the commentary by Artemis Alexiadou
Three types of exceptions – and all of them rule-based
Anomalies and exceptions
Distinguishing lexical and syntactic exceptions
Disagreement, variation, markedness, and other apparent exceptions
What is an exception to what? – Some comments on Ralf Vogel’s contribution
Response to van Riemsdijk
Describing exceptions in a formal grammar framework
Explanation and constraint relaxation
Unexpected loci for exceptions: languages and language families
Quantitative explorations of the worldwide distribution of rare characteristics, or: the exceptionality of northwestern European languages
Remarks on rarity
Some more details about the definition of rarity
Subject index
Language index