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Saturday, 6 JanuarySymposiumParadigms in Morphological ChangeCalifornia C2:00 – 5:00 PMOrganizers:Participants:Claire Bowern (Rice University)Andrew Garrett (University of California, Berkeley)Alice Harris (University at Stony Brook, State University of New York)Brian Joseph (Ohio State University)Harold Koch (Australian National University)Adam Albright (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)Data from language change may prove crucial in assessing theories of the organization of morphological systems. Changes clearlyshow what speakers dislike or find difficult; restructuring is a powerful way to see the analysis imposed on an old system. We areinterested also in the methodological question of how to argue from a change to what it actually reveals about the system underlyingit. Historical linguists have always been comfortable with word-and-paradigm morphology and its relatives, but is our comfortanything more than familiarity? Do changes furnish evidence bearing on the existence of paradigms as objects in morphologicaltheories, and how can we as historical linguists come to agree on the logic of this evidence?We evaluate empirical data of several types. One is the stuff of traditional discussions: cases of paradigm leveling and analogicalextension from the histories of languages whose inflectional diachrony is attested or can be reconstructed with a reasonable level ofconfidence. How are inflectional classes created and maintained, and how do they collapse? How do paradigm classes interact withmorphosemantic categories of different types? The work of Koch, Harris, and Albright all bear directly on these questions. A secondarea of inquiry is less traditional but equally important: Do paradigms emerge as a useful construct in language contact? Third, wecompare the patterns observed in language change with experimental psycholinguistic data and studies of computational modeling.We also present critical evaluation of proposed principles of paradigmatic diachrony.Our goal is to assemble clear relevant data, lay out the classes of evidence that theories in this area must consider, and help move thefield toward a new synthesis.Alice C. Harris (University at Stony Brook, State University of New York)Abstract patterns in SvanIn Svan, a Kartvelian language, a pattern was established in past tenses, contrasting the first and second persons singular against thethird person singular and all plurals. The pattern originated in regular sound changes of very common types (vowel fusion, umlaut)and underwent a very frequent morphological generalization. The unusual distributional pattern was generalized beyond the set ofverbs in which it had originated. These were purely morphological changes and cannot be explained through reference to phonologyor syntax. The changes show that the pattern of stem alternation can be abstracted from the morphosyntactic categories the wordsrealize.Brian Joseph (Ohio State University)Paradigms & speaker knowledge in verb-ending changeI discuss the reshaping of verb endings based on other paradigmatic forms, drawing on the development of Modern Greek nonactiveverb forms. For instance the 1PL past ending -mastan affected the shape of 2PL -esthe, leading to -sastan, and these two in turn ledto a new 3PL ending -ondustan from earlier -ondusan. Such verb-on-verb changes show "neighborhood effects" (Burzio 2005) withthe cells involved being adjacent, via shared feature specifications (here, [+plural]). These changes occur within the context of aparadigmatic arrangement of forms and thus support the paradigm as a basic organizing construct for inflectional forms.89