Paradigms (Optimal and Otherwise): A case for scepticism

This paper aims to contribute to the debate on the status of inflectional paradigms in grammatical theory, with special reference to the theory of Optimal Paradigms (OP, McCarthy 2005), a particular version of Paradigm Uniformity. OP proposes that certain systematic phonological differences between nouns and verbs should be analyzed as arising from contingent facts about the individual affixes making up the nominal and verbal inflectional paradigms. I argue here that the Arabic data presented in OP does not support the OP model (as against, for example, cyclic alternatives) and that consideration of similar phenomena in Itelmen, a language with richer inflectional paradigms, suggests that it is morpho-syntactic category and not paradigm properties, that determine phonological behaviour.

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