Lexical conservatism and its analysis

"Un mot quelconque peut toujours évoquer tout ce qui est susceptible de lui être associé d'une manière ou d'une autre. ..Un terme donné est comme le centre d'une constellation , le point où convergent d'autres termes coordonnés, dont la somme est indéfinie." Saussure "There is, I believe, a certain economy in language; new forms are not created just because the formal mechanism is there, if there is no need for them, and their creation would serve merely to crowd an already-existing and perfectly usable form." Cowgill 1. Listedness The first studies of generative morphology, Halle's (1973) "Prolegomena" and Aronoff's (1976) "Word Formation", have identified the phenomenon of blocking: a pre-existing, listed word blocks productive word formation processes from creating potential synonyms to it. Because of fury , *furiousness is blocked: it cannot be used in any of the senses known to be already covered by fury. Blocking reflects the speakers' preference to use known words, a phenomenon referred to here as lexical conservatism. This paper identifies the phonological side of lexical conservatism: phonological processes are, under certain circumstances, blocked from creating novel phonological variants to a listed stem. Rather than generating new allomorphs, speakers recycle already existing ones, even when none of the listed allomorphs gives full satisfaction to the applicable phonological and morphosyntactic conditions. The general interest of this variety of lexical conservatism is that, in order to provide it with an explicit description, it will be necessary to revise some of our basic assumptions about the relation between bases and their derivatives. The notions of listed word and listed allomorph will be essential to the analysis. I borrow these, with some extension, from Halle (1973), who notes that speakers are aware of the difference between potential and actual results of the word formation system of their language. Correspondingly, the term "listed" denotes here a degree of familiarity with a word, sufficient to give a speaker the confidence that the word has been sanctioned by past linguistic usage. A listed word is a non-hapax, a non-nonce form. A listed word, in the sense adopted here, may be a word whose morphological and phonological properties are fully predictable, given knowledge of the grammar and lexicon of the language: thus