caa a22 4500 388042982 CHVBK 20180307125027.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199811 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S1360674300000873 doi S1360674300000873 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S1360674300000873 Berg Thomas University of Hamburg The (in)compatibility of morpheme orders and lexical categories and its historical implications [Elektronische Daten] [Thomas Berg] English testifies to a remarkable pattern of lexical gaps. In quite a few cases, particlestem nouns (e.g. the income) and adjectives (e.g. incoming) exist in the current language whereas their corresponding verbs (e.g. *to income) do not. Verbs with the opposite morpheme order (e.g. to come in) are, of course, attested. Since most relevant nouns and adjectives are derivatives of verbs, the word-class shift must either have entailed an inversion of the morphemes, or the verbs must have dropped out of the language. A diachronic analysis does indeed reveal that particle-stem verbs have a lower ‘life-expectancy' than the corresponding nouns and adjectives. This difference is claimed to follow from differing degrees of compatibility between word classes and morpheme orders. The criterion of syntacticity shows particle-stem nouns and stem-particle verbs to be internally consistent but stem-particle nouns and particle-stem verbs to be inconsistent. This inconsistency gives rise to the observed historical instability of particle-stem verbs. While also disfavoured in this framework, the currency of stem-particle nouns (e.g. the handout) can be attributed to a conspiracy of several facilitatory effects which tend to override the arguments against this word type. The fact that linguistic units may fall into disuse necessitates certain revisions of the notion of optimality as the backbone of Optimality Theory. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998 English Language and Linguistics Cambridge University Press 2/2(1998-11), 245-262 1360-6743 2:2<245 1998 2 ELL https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674300000873 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674300000873 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Berg Thomas University of Hamburg NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- English Language and Linguistics Cambridge University Press 2/2(1998-11), 245-262 1360-6743 2:2<245 1998 2 ELL CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge