Stem-to-form relationships

• A Word and Paradigm (realizational) analysis of nouns and adjectives in Romance • Based on the notion of Stem Space (Pirrelli & Battista 2000; Bonami & Boyé 2003) • The stems of a lexeme distribute in a systematic way within the same language • This distribution is often purely morphological (i.e. a morphome, Aronoff 1994) • Stem-to-stem and stem-to-form relationships are similar in nature • They may correspond to a phonologically predictable function (including identity), although they are not (always) phonologically motivated • They may also be phonologically unpredictable (stem and form suppletion) • ‘Regular ’ lexemes are those from which the whole paradigm may be reconstructed from one form • What is most important is the relationship between paradigm cells • ‘Stems ’ emerge as generalisations from groups of paradigm cells sharing the same segmental information • Such notions as ‘stem’, ‘(inflectional) affix’, etc. are useful descriptive tools, but do not necessarily correspond to psychologically real entities • The exact segmental structure of stems, forms, etc. ceases to be an issue; it is more an empirical matter Regular lexemes (adjectives): Frenc