Horst J. Simon

Structured exceptions and case selection in Insular Scandinavian

The diachronic development of case selection in Insular Scandinavian (Icelandic and Faroese) provides strong support for a dichotomy of structured exceptions, which display partial productivity, and arbitrary exceptions, which are totally unproductive. Focusing on two kinds of exceptional case, we argue that verbs taking accusative experiencer subjects form a similarity cluster on the basis of shared lexical semantic properties, thus enabling new lexical items to be attracted to the cluster. By contrast, verbs taking genitive objects have no common semantic properties that could be the source of partial productivity.

Expecting the unexpected : exceptions in grammar

Every linguistic theory has to come to grips with a fundamental property of human language: the existence of exceptions, i.e. phenomena that do not follow the standard patterns one observes otherwise. The contributions to this volume discuss and exemplify a variety of approaches to exceptionality within different formal and non-formal frameworks.

Three types of exceptions – and all of them rule-based

A basic premise of this paper is that a simpler grammar is a more adequate one, and that thus exceptions are undesirable. We present studies concerning three different grammatical structures which contain phenomena standardly regarded as exceptions, and show how, in all three cases, the attribution of the status as an exception was unnecessary. In each case, the collection of better data and the explanatory advantages of firstly, a model of gradient grammaticality, and secondly the distinction between the effects of the grammar and the effects of production processing, reveal the phenomenon to be rule-governed.

Coming to grips with exceptions

Based on a general definition of the concept of exception, the problematic nature of exceptions is made explicit by showing how they weaken the generality of descriptions: they disrupt a superclass without forming a principled subclass. Focusing on examples from syntax, three approaches to dealing with exceptions are identified. 1. Why are exceptions a problem? 1.1. Defining exceptions Typical exceptions are a small subclass of a class where this subclass is not otherwise definable. What this means is that apart from their deviant characteristic that renders them exceptional, there is no additional property that distinguishes them from the regular cases. Given also that the exceptional subclass has generally much fewer members than the regular one, exceptions can be characterized as a subclass of a class that is weak both quantitatively (fewer members) and qualitatively (only a single distinguishing characteristic). The description of an exception must include five components: the pertinent domain; the class within which the items in question are exceptional, which we will call superordinate class (or superclass for short); the regular subclass and the irregular subclass; the characteristic in which the two subclasses differ; and the relative size of the two subclasses. This is shown in (1) on the example of English nominal plurals, where RSC labels the regular subclass and ESC is the label for the exceptional one. (1) domain: English superordinate class: plural nouns subclasses: RSC: apples, cats, pencils, etc. ESC: oxen, children, brethren distinguishing property: plural suffix is {s} versus /∂n/ relative size of membership: RSC > ESC Three components of the schema call for comments. Starting with domain: a structure may be exceptional within a language, a dialect of a language, a language family, a language area, or across languages. M. Cysouw’s paper in this volume is a study of crosslinguistic exceptionality and so is part of S. Featherston’s article. It is important to indicate the domain within which an exception holds because exceptionality is relative to it. First, what is an exceptional structure in one language may not be exceptional in another. An example is the morphosyntactic alignment of subjects of one-place predicates with patient-like arguments of two-place predicates: this is regular in ergative languages but exceptional in accusative languages. Second, language-internal and crosslinguistic exceptionality do not necessarily coincide. For example, click sounds are very numerous in Zulu but very rare across languages; and passive constructions are infrequent in Kirghiz, but frequent across languages. A second set of comments has to do with the distinguishing property of the exceptional class. Several papers in this volume emphasize the unique nature of exceptions. B. Kabak and I. Vogel are very explicit about this point as they analyze Turkish vowel harmony and stress assignment and argue for the need for lexical pre-specification of the irregular items as both necessary and sufficient for an adequate account. J.G. Jónsson and Th. Eythórsson also emphasize that truly exceptional structures have no correlating properties. They show genitive objects in Icelandic to be clearly exceptional by this criterion, as opposed to accusative subjects, which show subregularities. As two of the papers in the volume show, items may differ from the regular class in more than one characteristic. G. Corbett discusses lexemes that show higher-order exceptionality by multiply violating normal morphological patterns. Utilizing the WALS database, M. Cysouw computes rarity indices for languages and language areas and shows that they may be multiply exceptional to varying degrees. Paradoxically, exceptions that differ from the regular subclass in more than one way are less exceptional by our definition since each exceptional property finds its correlates in the other deviant characteristics. Lexical items may be exceptional not by structurally deviating from others but by exhibiting skewed, rather than balanced, frequency patterns of their alternative forms. For example, the passive form of the English verb convict occurs with unusual frequency relative to the passive of other verbs. Such “soft exceptions” are in the focus of Th. Wasow, F. Jaeger, and D. Orr’s paper (this volume) as they explore correlates for the omission of the conjunction that in English relative clauses. The third comment pertains to relative size. Note that having fewer members is a necessary but not sufficient characteristic of an exceptional subclass. That it is necessary can be shown by the example in (1): without reserving the label “exception” for the smaller subclass, English nouns whose plural is formed with {s} would qualify for being the exceptions even though intuitively we do not to consider them exceptional. But being a small subclass is not sufficient for exceptionality. For example, of the English verbs whose past tense form ends in {d}, relatively few employ the allomorph /∂d/. But this subclass of verbs is not exceptional because the members have a phonological property in common that defines them as a principled, rather than random, class. An apparent counterexample to the regular class having more members than the exceptional class(es) is nominal plural marking in German. There are five plural markers: -0, -e, -(e)n, and –s; which – if any should be considered the regular one? Although most nouns of the German lexicon take –(e)n, Clahsen, Rothweiler, and Woest (1992) argue convincingly that –s is actually the default form: it is the only productive one, used with names (e.g. die Bäckers) and with newly-minted words such as clippings (e.g. Loks for Lokomotiven) or loan words (e.g. Kiosks). Given that relatively few existing nouns are pluralized with –s, declaring this form to be the regular ending would seem to conflict with the general pattern of the regular class having a larger membership than the exceptional ones. However, there is in fact no conflict: the very fact that –s is productive expands indefinitely the class of nouns that take it as their plural suffix. 1.2. Two problems with exceptions Why are exceptions a problem? The short answer is that they fly in the face of generalizations. This is so due to two aspects of their definition. First, by token of the very fact that they form a subclass of a class, they conflict with a generalization that would otherwise hold for the entire superordinate class. This problem so far is not specific to exceptions: it is posed by all instances of subclassification: subclasses, by definition, compromise the homogeneity of a superclass. But as long as the subclasses have at least one characteristic other than the one that the split is based on, the loss of the supergeneralization is compensated for by a sub-generalization that describes the subclasses. For an example of regular subclasses, let us consider those English nouns that form their plural with the suffix {s}. This is not an undivided class in that the particular shape of the suffix is variable: -/s/, -/z/, and –/∂z/. However, each subclass is definable by phonological context: /-∂z/ after alveolar and palatal fricatives and affricates, /s/ after other voiceless sounds and /z/ after other voiced sounds. Thus, none are exceptions. Exceptional subclasses are different from normal subclasses of this sort because they have no additional characteristics to independently identify them. This is the second reason why exceptions pose a problem: they do not only scuttle a generalization that would otherwise hold for the entire superordinate class but they do not allow for a generalization about their subclass, either. The fact that exceptions have much fewer members than their sister-classes compounds the problem: their sporadicity suggests that correlating properties may not exist at all: they may be random chance phenomena. All in all: exceptions disrupt supergeneralizations without supporting sub-generalizations. In the case of English noun plurals, the two generalizations that the exceptions disallow are given in (2). (2) (a) supergeneralization lost: **All English nouns form their plural with {s}. (b) subgeneralization not possible: **All those English nouns that form their plural with /∂n/ have property P. The two problems posed by exceptions can be similarly illustrated with a crosslinguistic example: phoneme inventories that lack nasal consonant phonemes. (3) domain: a sample of languages superordinate class: consonant phoneme inventories subclasses: RSC: consonant phoneme inventories of English, Irish, Amharic, etc. ESC: consonant phoneme inventories of Quileute, Puget Sound, Duwamish, Snoqualmie, Mura, Rotokas distinguishing property: presence versus absence of nasal consonant phonemes relative membership: RSC > ESC The two generalizations disabled by the exceptional consonant phoneme inventories are as follows: (4) (a) supergeneralization lost: **All consonant phoneme inventories of languages include nasal consonant phonemes. (b) subgeneralization not possible: **All those languages that lack nasal consonant phonemes have property P. The lesser number of nasal-less languages suggests once again that their occurrence is for no reason: it may be an accident. How are the twin problems posed by exceptions responded to in linguistic analysis? The purpose of this paper is to address this question by surveying the various ways in which exceptions have been dealt with in syntax. The alternatives fall into three basic types. First, many descriptive frameworks represent exceptional structures as both exceptional and nonexceptional. What this means is that the representation of the exceptional structure is split into two parts: one shows it to be exceptional but the other part draws it into the regular class. Second, there are proposals for regularizing exceptions: re-analyzing them so that they turn out to be fully unexceptional. And th