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Claire Bowern (Rice University)Morphological change in Nyikina verbal prefix bundlesThe Nyikina language of North-Western Australia has preserved much of the material of Proto-Nyulnyulan verbal prefixes. However,while the same categories (person, tense, and transitivity) are marked in the prefix bundle, there are differences in underlyingorganization. The intransitive prefixes continue the old past (intransitive) paradigm, while the transitive forms continue the oldpresent (transitive) paradigm. What seems to have happened is that a merger of present and past tense led to the association of the n-morpheme with the meaning 'intransitive', because it now stood in opposition to forms with the transitive marker n-, rather than inopposition to forms marked for present tense. Such a change does not necessarily bear on the question of whether paradigms were aseparate component of the grammar which produced the input to the change.Harold Koch (Australian National University)Paradigm-dependent processes of morphological changeI describe and illustrate from typologies of morphological change those changes that are most dependent on the concept of paradigmand hence provide the strongest support for paradigms as a term in linguistic theory and the greatest obstacles for theories that woulddispense with paradigms. A traditional type of change is paradigm leveling, in which alternation between stem forms is eliminatedfrom inflectional paradigms through the generalization of one of the variants. The domain of leveling depends heavily on paradigms.Of the many changes traditionally called ‘analogical’, those which introduce intraparadigm allomorphy or redistribute the allomorphsof lexical stems under the influence of the inflectional pattern of other lexemes (interparadigm analogy) would seem to stronglysupport the concept of paradigms. Similarly the forms of inflectional markers of one inflectional class are often transformed under theinfluence of other (especially dominant) inflectional classes.Adam Albright (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)Paradigmatic change without paradigmsAnalogical changes frequently involve switches between paradigm types, e.g. German gibe/gibst/gibt --> gebe/gibst/gibst, mirroringthe pattern of trage/trägst/trägt. But does this prove that paradigms are cognitively represented as templates? If so, we should be ableto observe their role in motivating or constraining change. However, detailed examination of changes in progress reveals thatapparently paradigmatically motivated cases often defy paradigmatic explanation, e.g. German textual evidence shows an intermediatestage unlike any previous or surviving pattern: gebe/gibst/gebt. A similar change is currently creating new paradigm types in Korean.Such cases suggest that paradigmatic changes are not motivated by competition between templates.90