Re: HELP: Adding irregularities to conlangs?

Philip wrote:

<<What are IA and WP models? That is, what do the abbreviations stand
for, and could you explain them in a sentence or two each?>>

Oops: Sorry.   IA stands for Item and Arrangement and WP stands for
Word and Paradigm.

Item and Arrangement is a catch-all term for morphological theories
that assume that meaning is concatenative.   In other words, that
individual morphemes carry meaning.   Thus, with a word like "kids",
composed of two morphemes, you combine the meaning of the
morpheme KID plus the meaning of the morpheme PLURAL to get
the meaning of KID+PLURAL, or "kids".

Word and Paradigm is a catch-all term for a series of models which
takes as its assumption that meaning is not built up from a series of
parts.   So, rather that having a KID morpheme and a PLURAL morpheme,
WP models assume that each lexeme can be associated with certain
features.   Instead of building up meaning from parts, meaning is what you
start out with.   So you start out with the formless idea of what a kid is,
and what it means for a kid to be plural.   Then in various ways, exponence
(i.e., an actual phonological form) is associated with the feature set to
produce [k_hIdz].   If "various ways" sounds vague, well, I did it on purpose
because the term "Word and Paradigm" covers a whole bunch of different
morphological theories that assign exponence to a feature set in very
different ways.   One way is through realizational rules.   So here's what
the rule for English would look like:

R1: {N, +Plural}    <X> -> <Xs>

What that says if you have a form in whose feature set are the featurs N and
+Plural, then a realizational rule takes the exponence (X) and adds "s" to
it.
Under this system, phonology would happen "somewhere else" (this was
never clearly defined).

Anyway, that's just one example of one WP model.   The main difference is
the theoretical difference.

-David
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"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

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